How Elizabeth Strout Paid the Bills While She Wrote the Books
“I went back to law school because I could get more writing done during law school than I could when I had to support myself.”
Elizabeth Strout worked as a cocktail waitress, an office temp, a lawyer, and a community college professor before publishing her first novel, Amy and Isabelle. She won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge (which was turned into an HBO series). Her seventh novel, Olive, Again, is coming out in fall 2019. Here’s how she made ends meet.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Medium: Did you study writing in college?
Elizabeth Strout: I studied theater. It was like writing, because I was always trying to be another person. But I never took a creative writing class. I can’t say anything more than my intuition was “it will not be good for me to sit among my peers and hear what they have to say about my work and to say things about their work.” But I was always writing. There was one professor who knew that, and he was the chairman of the English department. He believed in me. I would show him my stories, and when I had a paper due for his class, he would give me a short story instead. It was our secret.
