Published in 2026, The Things We Never Say is a work of literary fiction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout. Known for acclaimed novels like Olive Kitteridge and My Name Is Lucy Barton, which exist within an interconnected fictional universe, Strout departs from this structure with a standalone story set in a coastal Massachusetts town. The novel centers on Artie Dam, a beloved 57-year-old high school history teacher who, despite his jovial exterior, is privately consumed by loneliness. His quiet life is fractured when a destructive family secret about his son, Rob, comes to light, forcing him to confront decades of deception within his marriage and re-evaluate his own identity.

The narrative is deeply embedded in the social and political anxieties of the early 2020s in the United States, exploring The Negative Effects of Political Polarization by depicting the bitter “culture wars” over the teaching of history that disrupt Artie’s school and community. This atmosphere of national decline mirrors Artie’s personal despair and informs the novel’s philosophical questions about free will and determinism. As Artie’s world unravels, the novel examines The Weight of Unspoken Truths, and the story also explores concepts of kinship and identity,  Redefining Fatherhood as a Social Commitment.

This guide refers to the 2026 Random House edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of racism, religious discrimination, pregnancy loss, cursing, bullying, child abuse, antigay bias, mental illness, suicidal ideation, death by suicide, and death.

Plot Summary

Artie Dam is a well-liked, 57-year-old high school history teacher in a coastal Massachusetts town, but he harbors a growing, unnamed fear and a deep loneliness that has intensified ever since his gregarious friend, Flossie MacDonald, moved to Ohio. During their last visit together before her move, Flossie confided that she still misses her late husband, Reginald, despite her conviction that he was an “asshole.” These days, Artie maintains a jovial façade for the sake of his students and colleagues, but he misses the friendly connection he had with Flossie and laments the growing distance he senses between himself and his wife, Evie. He is also troubled by the gulf that has grown between him and his son, Rob, ever since a car accident killed Rob’s girlfriend 10 years ago.

Feeling increasingly detached from his life, Artie secretly spends his nights researching ways to die by suicide that would appear accidental to those left behind. (His best theory for how to accomplish this would be to take his sailboat out one day and stage his own drowning.) As his inner battle continues, he worries over the anxiety he observes in his students, especially the awkward Rhonda Lazarre, and he experiences an uncharacteristic fit of rage when he sees another student, Danny Marino, mocking her.

The disquiet in Artie’s life is compounded when Rob announces that he is in the midst of an amicable break-up with his wife, an older concert pianist named Francesca, and has found a new love interest, a younger woman named Rachel. Artie’s sense of unreality is further intensified when the plumber he hires (coincidentally, the father of Danny Marino) breaks down in Artie’s bathroom and begins crying over his own wife’s infidelity. These events underscore Artie’s conviction that just like him, everyone around him is concealing deep, private pain of their own.

In the midst of Artie’s secret plans for suicide, he has a vivid dream about falling off his boat and drowning. One week later, as he prepares for his usual sail, he has a genuine accident, slipping into the frigid water and drifting away on a fast current. Weighed down by his water-filled boots and coat, he begins to drown but is rescued by a man named Kenneth Moynihan and his son.

In the hospital, Artie realizes that he did not truly want to die; he simply did not want to live his life as it was. The near-death experience jolts him back to life, but it also prompts a raw confrontation with Rob, who asks if Artie’s accident was intentional. Rob tearfully confesses that he views his father as an “explorer” whose actions chart the way for him; if Artie were to die by suicide, Rob would see it as permission to do the same. Shaken by this glimpse of his son’s despair, Artie promises never to do such a thing, and a new, fragile honesty begins to form between them.

A few weeks later, Artie and Evie meet Rob’s new love interest, Rachel, a young, insecure girl whom Evie later blames for filching a small knick-knack.

One day, possessed by a premonition that Rob is in trouble, Artie drives to his son’s apartment in Somerville. Rob breaks down and reveals a destructive secret that he learned seven months prior: Artie is not his biological father. The late Reginald MacDonald, Flossie’s husband, sent Rob a deathbed letter claiming paternity, explaining that he “accommodated” Evie years ago when she and Artie were struggling to conceive. A DNA test that Rob recently took confirmed Reginald’s claim. Artie is stunned, but his immediate, unwavering response is that Rob is his son and that this revelation makes no difference.

In the midst of this conversation, Rob’s estranged wife Francesca arrives home early from her trip to Paris, and Artie discovers that she has known the secret all along and has been supporting Rob. The three of them form an immediate, intimate bond, united by the secret they now share from Evie. Artie takes Reginald’s letter and decides not to confront Evie. This day thus begins a new chapter of his life in which he consciously lies to her through omission and is newly aware that she has been lying to him for 28 years.

The knowledge of Evie’s betrayal destabilizes Artie, alienating him from his former life and causing his behavior to become erratic. He impulsively shoplifts a pen and is later caught trying to steal two shirts from a men’s store owned by Charles Schwartz, who kindly lets him go, intuiting that Artie’s misbehavior is a psychological side effect of a recent emotional loss.

As time goes on, Artie’s suppressed anger over Evie’s affair with Reginald manifests in abrupt ways; he calls Evie’s deceased father “vulgar” during an argument, and he orders a disruptive student, Rick Roper, out of his classroom for using an antigay slur: an unprecedented act in his long career. At the same time, Artie forges a deeper connection with Danny Marino. After interrupting Danny vandalizing a school wall with graffiti that reads “FUCK YO,” Artie confides that he, too, wants to “say fuck you to the world” (142). Instead of punishing the boy, he helps Danny scrub the wall clean, and this shared secret becomes a turning point for Danny, who begins to realize that adults are complex individuals with their own hidden sorrows.

Artie’s relationships continue to shift around his new knowledge about Evie’s past affair and Rob’s true parentage. He and Rob grow closer than ever, with Rob seeking Artie’s fatherly advice on how to break up with his new girlfriend, Rachel, whose habit of impulsive theft has become too blatant to explain away. Artie also forms a strong friendship with Ken Moynihan, the man who saved his life; Ken becomes his sole confidant about Rob’s parentage. On Thanksgiving, Rob and a reconciled Francesca join Artie and Evie, and the three secret-keepers share a warm, familial bond while Evie remains oblivious to the unspoken undercurrents. However, Artie’s connections to his old life soon begin to fray; a lunch with his colleague Anne Merrill feels strained and dishonest, as he can no longer share his life with her. His social world has been cleaved in two: The part that knows the truth about his family, and the part that does not.

On Christmas Day, which he and Evie spend alone, Artie makes the final decision never to reveal that he knows about her secret. His quiet holiday is shattered when Evie casually mentions that his new best friend, Ken Moynihan, is a fervent supporter of the newly elected president, a man whom Artie sees as a national catastrophe. This revelation emphasizes the deep, unspoken divides that permeate all of his relationships.

On New Year’s Day, Artie meets Flossie at Spud’s Bar and Grille but instinctively knows that things can never be the same between them. Their old camaraderie is gone, replaced by a tense performance of their earlier friendship. Flossie, growing drunk and maudlin, confesses to a long-ago affair with Anne Merrill’s husband. She then muses that perhaps the new president will be good for the country because he will “shake things up” (189). In Artie, the phrase triggers an uncontrollable paroxysm of an “emotion that was not remotely laughter but appeared that way” (189). laughter in Artie. Tears stream down his face as he laughs, expressing a sound of pure anguish for his country, for the deaths of his friendships, for his son, and for the crushing weight of all the things left unsaid.

In the ensuing years, Artie’s physical and mental health rapidly decline. As the country’s political situation deteriorates just as Artie feared, Rob and Francesca move to Brussels, where Rob begins working for the European Union.

Several years pass. Upon coming back to visit Artie, an adult Danny Marino discovers that Artie had a nervous breakdown in his classroom a few months ago and was forced to retire. The narrative reveals that Artie has been diagnosed with depression and has sold his beloved sailboat.

During a severe heat wave, Artie dies in his sleep from a massive heart attack, the same way his father died. Years after the funeral, Evie discovers Reginald’s confessional letter to Rob in a box of Artie’s things. She is stunned and calls Rob in Brussels; he offers her no sympathy and does not take her side. Devastated, Evie is left to live out the rest of her life alone with the weight of her discovered lie, repeatedly telling people that her husband, Artie, was a “saint.”