The Burgess Boys, Elizabeth Strout's follow-up to her 2008 Pulitzer Prize–winning book Olive Kitteridge, follows two brothers who've returned to their hometown to help their sister manage her troubled son. Strout set the psychologically rich story in Maine's Shirley Falls, the same fictional hamlet she imagined in her 1998 debut, Amy and Isabelle — only this time she explores how the state's growing population of Somali immigrants is impacting the community. Strout spoke with Vulture about Maine's lack of diversity, writing post-Pulitzer, and novels in the iPhone age.
Junot Díaz, also with you in the Pulitzer winners club, has said he imagined he’d have twenty books by now, then realized it’s a lot slower and tougher than that. Do you get frustrated with your pace?It seems to me that I should be able to be faster, at this point, having been writing all my life. I feel some frustration about that, but it doesn’t seem to be anything I can help.
This is your first book since you won the Pulitzer. Jennifer Egan got it two years after you, for A Visit From the Goon Squad, and she recently wrote about the pressure she was feeling about her follow-up. She wrote, "You’re going to hate the next [book]. The whole world’s going to hate the next one. I have no idea why this one got so much love." Can you relate?Well, I certainly sympathize with what she’s saying there. I think that when I’m working, which is a lot, I’m really just so involved in the work that I don’t think about that. But often when I’m not working — when I look up, let’s say — then I think, Oh, man. People are gonna be mad because it’s not Olive, and … But the fact of the matter is I always have a really high sense of responsibility to the reader, whether it’s a few readers that I get or a lot of readers, which I was lucky enough to get with Olive. I feel responsible to them, to deliver something as truthful and straight as I can. And so I don’t remember that there was a whole lot of excessive worry about the post-Pulitzer thing, but I look back now and think there must have been and I was just submerging it or something, or just putting in the work.
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