[Music] Elizabeth St [Music] [Music] em for [Music] [Music] [Music] Elizabeth Stout Que vuro [Applause] gra wow okay hello everyone I am so pleased um I'm so pleased to be speaking to you all today at the opening of this wonderful Book Festival in Turin I call it Turin sorry um I want you to know that I love Italy it is my favorite country to visit and um that's been true for many many years so many thanks to those of you um who have made sure to invite me I mean who invited me to give this address to you and many thanks to you all for listening is that may um and my greatest admiration goes out to the turn Book Festival thank you so originally I was asked uh to say something about being a woman and therefore a woman writer but here's the truth I have almost nothing to say about that um and this is why I am a woman I am a writer therefore I am a woman writer do I ever feel disrespected because of that maybe sometimes do I ever let that bother me no because there's not one thing I can do about it except to be the best writer that I can be so I'm going to talk to you today about instead why it took me so long to get to this point in my career and maybe part of that was because I was a woman but I do not know if that's true and so we will just leave it at that um let me just say to begin with this in the original book Olive kitridge there is a scene where Olive um being distressed by her new daughter-in-law who has just spoken poorly about Olive's dress for the wedding there's a scene where Olive steals her daughter-in-law's bazer and one shoe just one shoe hoping it will make the young woman crazy my point in mentioning this is that when I went out on the road with that book now so many years ago I will never forget the number of women who leaned into me in the signing line after and said very quietly you must have a daughter-in-law and I did not but what I realized by these women's responses was how many women must want to be stealing their daughter-in-law's bazer and one shoe and I thought then okay I've done it because my entire life I have believed in this power of fiction that it allows us to see into other people's lives and to recognize our own feelings and maybe for many of those women who responded to Olive that way they can feel better about themselves because they never did steal their daughter-in-law's bazer or one shoe but they wanted to Olive has become their friend and it was in Italy when a woman spoke to me in Italian after my presentation and The Interpreter said to me she said you have seen into her soul and that right there is all I ever wanted to make someone else feel not so alone in their private thoughts I believed from a very very young age that I would be able to do that if I just never gave up I was 42 years old when my first book am in Isabelle was published so how did I keep myself going all those years the truth is I have no memory of myself not being a writer which means that by the age of four or five I was writing things down in those children's notebooks they used to have that had you know those huge spaces between the lines and this was because of my mother only many many years later did I realize that she had wanted to be a writer herself it makes me think of Carl Young's quote nothing affects the life of a child so much as the unlived life of its parent but my mother was the furnace of my life and it was my mother who gave me those notebooks and she said write down what you did today so if we went into town to buy me new Little Red Sneakers my mother said to me when we got home right down what the man was like who sold us those sneakers and so I did but you're not going to be a writer just because when you're little your mother tells you to write down what you did today there are multitudes of other factors in the making of a writer and one of them for me was isolation we lived back then in New Hampshire and also in Maine and in both places we lived far outside the town in the woods there were no other houses around for many years and I played in those woods alone in New Hampshire there was a creek and also a stone wall and my parental directions were do not cross the creek and do not cross the stone wall and in that way I had four acres of woods and pine needles and wild flowers all to myself for hours on end I was extraordinarily happy in those woods the beauty of the physical world seemed to be my first and dearest friend I would play with the toads and with the turtles that were in the creek and then there were the wild flowers that I gathered and brought home to my mother she pressed them in a big book for me this ability to be alone this joy in being alone I have often thought served me very well for the life of the writer I was to become I should add that we had no television my parents did not believe in it they were Puritans and very strict and we had no newspapers as well the news came from a radio in the kitchen which was turned on every morning and so interestingly I remember the day when the radio announced that Papa Hemingway had died I was 5 years old that day but I remember the newscast 's voice coming through that radio about this man Papa Hemingway and my mother had tears in her eyes now we did have a piano and I took lessons at some point I wanted to quit my piano lessons and my mother did not let me I went on to study eventually with a retired concert pianist who was at the University of New Hampshire and he taught me this that every single note matters and I think of him often as I write because every single word matters now about reading I should say I have no memory of children's books in the house my mother never read to me as a child and it was my father who taught me to read but on the top of a bookshelf in our living room was a row of blue books in cheap covers this was the work of Hemingway my grandfather had bought them from a traveling salesman and during the summer of my 17th year I read them all straight through but before then I would make lists for myself of books to read and either get them from the library or buy paperbacks with my babysitting money and I think in this way I was very self-taught which also as I look back was a really good thing for my life as a writer because I could accept these books by myself the texts would rise up to me with no teacher telling me anything about them at all and so there was a purity to that but it's not just books that make a writer a writer I think has to be unbelievably curious about people around them and we had very few people around us in these towns whenever I did go into town with my parents my father would go and do his business and my mother and I would wait in the car watching people walk by in the sidewalk once I remember my mother said oh look at that woman she's not anxious to get home to her husband and I scrambled in my seat to watch the woman my mother was talking about and I said how can you tell and my mother said just look at her and so I noticed then that the woman's expression she seemed grim and look at the Hem of her coat that hasn't been fixed in ages my mother added she's depressed I watched the woman all the way down the sidewalk and I wanted to go into her house I wanted to see what her front doorway looked like were there many boots and shoes by the door what did her kitchen smell like I will in this talk keep returning to my mother because she was so instrumental in my becoming a writer but what about my father he was a very kind man a deacon of the Congregational Church and he was a scientist he was a professor at the the University of New Hampshire here is an example of the difference between my parents one Sunday when I was very small we went to church and what I remember was that a woman who my parents KN knew named Clara wore a hat now you have to understand at this time congregational churches in New England were just as plain as they could be and except for Easter no one ever wore a hat but Clara that day had worn a hat and it was some hat it had twirly things coming off it and some fake fruit was on it and it was a little bit scary to me as we drove home my mother said to my father now why in hell did Clara wear that hat and my father said as he frequently did if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all well this is a great sentiment but it is death for a writer and it has occurred to me more than once that as a writer I have tried to combine my mother's Keen Eye with my father's natural compassion and then a few years later this happened when I was about 12 years old we suddenly got neighbors a little White House was built next to ours and into it moved a couple and a a nice couple and a cute baby and I babysat for the baby and one time my parents must have been out of town because I spent the night at the neighbor's house after babysitting and in the morning the woman of the house made french toast and she cut it in diagonal slices and sprinkled confectionary sugar over the top and in my entire life I had never seen anything so beautiful so when my parents returned home I told my mother about this thing of Wonder hoping of course that she might take the hint and start making french toast for us in such a manner and she listened to me she let me go on and then when I was done she said well Elizabeth just remember you never know and boy did that turn my head around she meant of course you never know what goes on in anyone's house and she was right and I think it was at that moment that my curiosity became absolutely inflamed because we don't know what goes on inside anyone's home not really we often don't know everything that is going on in our own home and we certainly don't know what is going on in someone else's mind this was about the same time that I realized we will never know on this Earth anyway what it is like to be another person we will only see things through our own two eyes and boy did that frustrate me one time I gave a talk in which I mentioned at length how important it was to imagine what it was like to be another person I went on about how it gives us empathy and all that sort of thing and afterward this very cheerful woman walked up to me and she said that was so interesting I have never once tried to imagine what it's like to be another person and I thought whoa what is that like what's it like to be you my fascination with other people began at such a young age that I can barely remember not looking at someone and wondering who are you later in New York City on the Subways I would sit across from a woman and I would think okay I know what that feels like to have your jeans that tight and I would watch the Expressions on the faces of these people and when I left the Train sometimes I would arrange my own face like the face of a man who I had seen with a Furrow in his brow and his lips puckered and I realized oh if your face is like that all the time you're very worried my point is this has become so instinctive for me for so many years that I cannot remember never doing it so we have a mother encouraging her daughter to write things down we have the books in the house we have a curiosity about other people but still we need more than that to create a fiction writer we need to make the sentences into something that can get conveyed to another person and thus began my very long apprenticeship in finding my own storytelling Voice by the time I was 16 years old I was typing up stories on an old Smith Corona typewriter that my parents had I sent them all to the New Yorker and to the Atlantic and they all came back within two weeks with what was then a Xerox copy that said we are sorry but this story is not for us I was not deterred I suppose my mother must have known about this but if so she never said a word my mother taught English at our local high school yet having her teaching in the school was uncomfortable for me and I think it was uncomfortable for her as well I never felt that I could get out from being Mrs Stout's daughter in high school I really did not like it and with my mother's encouragement I left high school after my junior year without graduating and went straight to college in Maine this was when I had my first sort of mentor the chairman of the English Department at this college was a teacher of mine my first semester and I liked him and he liked me and we talked in his office sometimes and I told him I wanted to be a writer let me see your stuff he said and so I did and if I wrote something this professor didn't think was very good he would say I don't think this is very good if I wrote something he liked he would say I like this one day he said you know Liz how about every time you have a paper do in class you give me a short story instead and it will be our little secret so I did and I took every class I could with that man but I never took a creative writing class the whole time I was in college my intuition told me it would not be helpful to me to hear what my peers thought of my work and I never took a psychology class either again my intuition told me that what I needed to know about people would not be found in a psychology class I want to say this about intuition it is essential for a fiction writer my mother had this sort of intuition and I believe I inherited it from her a number of years ago I was sitting in a hotel room with her and she glanced out the window and she said oh second wife and I said mom come on how do you know that's a second wife and so I went to the window and I said oh yeah second wife I was married to a trial lawyer at the time who always liked proof and there is no proof when you're a writer there is only your intuition when I graduated from college this professor who had been kind to me said no one will be interested in your work and he was exactly right no one was remotely interested but I was determined and I took jobs that left me the time or mental space to keep writing meaning I mostly worked in bars at night either playing the piano or cocktail w sing I moved to England for a year and worked at a pub in Oxford always always writing my father by the way was distraught by this he said you had that expensive education and you're just a barid but that professor of mine was correct nobody was interested in my work nobody cared at that point I had learn not to tell people what I knew about myself that I was a writer because if I ever did they would look at me with a variety of responses mostly pity for being so self-d delusional and also for leaking grandiosity so I just didn't tell anyone I think even my mother at that point had lost faith in me and my father was essentially just waiting for me to get married one night when I was cocktail waitressing I had a thought and the thought was this if I am a 58-year-old cocktail waitress don't know why it's 58 but if I I thought if I'm a 58-year-old cocktail waitress and I have failed at my writing that will have been a pathetic life keep that in mind I'll return to it again the thought was if I am a 58-year-old cocktail waitress and a failed writer my life will have been pathetic so I went to law school I went to Syracuse law school which felt like a different country to me in some way and then I dropped out of law school after my first year and I wrote a really bad novel but here's something interesting Syracuse had a writing program and I mostly hung out with the writers in that program and not so much the law students so why did I not transfer into that writing program well first I'm not sure I would have gotten in I got to know Raymond Carver personally he was such a kind man and I sh showed him a story of mine at the urging of his students and he said I really don't like stories in the second person I also took one class with Tobias wolf he's also a very lovely man and I dropped out of the class while I could still get my money back because he praised a student's piece of work that I thought was not praiseworthy at all so I did not apply to that program I somehow knew and still know know that to be the writer I was I had to rely on my own sense of what my work was worth and what was worthy of Praise but I also didn't apply to that writing program because I noticed this that the students there my friends talked about writing all the time but in fact they were actually doing far less writing than I was on my own so during this time of not being in school I had my usual assortment of jobs and at one point I landed a job in a department store which I thought was going to be absolutely glamorous and it turned out I could not sell the manager watched me and she said Elizabeth if somebody comes in to buy a skirt then you're to walk over to them with a blouse and say this blouse would look just terrific with that skirt but I couldn't do it I didn't like it when sales clerks did that to me and I could not do it to others so I was sent up to the eighth floor to sell mattresses I would sit on one of them with my notebook and write and I never sold a mattress not one maybe once a week a couple would step off the elevator and tentatively walk in and I would say try any mattress and after a few moments they walked out I went back to law school but here was thing I had noticed in that department store that in the women's Lounge the restroom there would be a number of older women who sat there for much of the day they would bring in a paper bag of who knows what and just sit there and I understood they had no place to go these older women moved me very much I noticed that they did not talk to each other their loneliness was palpable so I went back to law school and I also myself a gerentology certificate at the School of Social Work my idea was that I would do elder law and that it would have a little storefront on the Main Street of the town and that any elderly person who wanted to could come sit in it all day and then I would write at night anyway I also during this time worked in the nursing home of the town I befriended a woman who lived there named Mary Anna she had no teeth and she was supposed to be allowed to get dentures though nobody ever had gotten them for her so I set out to do this the day before we were to go to the dentist Mary Anna wanted me to polish her fingernails and I remember paint painting her fingernails a bright red as her hands shook before me we went off to the dentist and maryana got her teeth and then she never wore them these are the things I have used in my work so many years later I suspect my interest in gerontology came from the fact that in Maine we lived on a dirt road with a few other small houses and in these houses lived my great aunts so my Young World consisted of these older women who were quite depressed and they would gather and speak in their dry man accents of their dead husbands and the last meals that these men ate one of of my great aunts was a woman named Olive she was probably the sweetest one of them I remember her tapping her cigarette and saying I'm so glad Frank had the mackerel that last night and potatoes just the way he liked them children often feel responsible for those around them and I suspect that I felt responsible for these elderly aunts of mine and any event I have always been interested in the elderly all right so I graduated from law school and I got a job with legal services and I was terrible at it I did not have an adversarial bone in my body but I did not know that until one of my clients Services were cut and I was told by the lawyer in the office well call the Schoolboard and tell them we'll see them in court tomorrow I had to closed the door to my office my Palms left sweat marks on the desk and I meekly made the phone call and I understood I was just terrible I had a darling client one time whose benefits had been cut and I went to plead his case before an administrative law judge who said to me you have nice legs and then he denied the benefits to my client it was about this time that I went home one day after work and I stood in the backyard and I thought to myself okay I can be a terrible lawyer for the rest of my life or I can give myself over and write forever even if it doesn't work out and that's when I remembered how I had had that thought years earlier that if I was a 58-year-old cocktail waitress and my writing had not worked out it would have been a pathetic life and I stood there on that back lawn and I thought no that would not have been a pathetic life a pathetic life is if I do not try with my entire heart to be the writer I have always known that I am at that point I was married with a small child and we still moved to New and we moved to New York City and I still wrote every minute that I could I got a job teaching English at a community college and I loved it I would teach in the mornings and come home before my daughter got home from school and would write those few hours every day now when I was 30 years old this happened I read a short story in a magazine and I I really liked the story and I saw in the by line that the author was a fiction editor at the New Yorker and his name was Dan mener so I sent a story to him directly and he wrote a personal note saying it was good please try him again and so I did and he called me up and told me that the story had been rejected but only by one vote and to keep on trying it was to be 13 more years before I had a story published in the New Yorker but Dan mener during most of those years would write me the loveliest rejections I probably only sent him two stories a year but he was always very generous in his in his response to them and it helped keep me going but it was about this time that I thought what is wrong with my work why is it not happening and I kept thinking there must be some truth I'm not getting at but I could not for the life of me figure out what the truth was that was eluding me when we moved to the city I became interested in comedy and my husband and I would go to the little standup comedy clubs in the village and I realized this when people laughed it was because something had been said that was true so I began to wonder what would come out of my mouth if I was immediately responsible to the people standing there in front of me so I signed up for a standup comedy class at the news school and it was one of the most frightening things that I have ever done as a final exam I had to perform at a comedy club in New York I didn't allow anyone I knew to attend and the place was packed that night when it was my turn I stepped out and began my routine and in a moment there was a low laughter from a man and I will never forget that what I felt toward this man was almost erotic so I did my routine and they asked me to come back and audition for a Tuesday night weekly job but I said no I knew that night itself had probably taken at least two years off my life but here is what happened my intuition was right it worked my routine was all about making fun of myself as an uptight white woman from New England and I swear to you that until I did that routine I did not even know I was a white woman that's how white I was and I did not really understand until I did that routine what it meant to come from New England it was its own separate culture and so I began to write Amy and Isabel what would be my first published novel about an uptight white woman from New England who works in a shoe factory as I had worked one summer I am not Isabelle goodro but I understood her for two years that completed book sat on our dining room table while I looked in vain for an agent and then a friend suggested that I contact Dan mener who had since moved to random house as an editor and so I sent him the book and he loved it he said let's get you an agent and the next week I had five different lunches with five different agents who all wanted to take me on when the book came out it did very well and while I should have been pleased the truth is I was terrified all of a sudden there were reporters in our home People magazine did a shoot of me on my bicycle I had to make sure I was wearing something red and the whole thing was overwhelming I was sent to 27 cities on a book tour and back then there were local television shows that I had to be on and I could not tell anyone frightened I was everybody was very excited about me many people said what an overnight success and I thought yeah about a 40y year overnight but never mind I persevered as I had done my whole life and as I have continued to do so and it turned out I began to write faster and faster it was as though I had been training for a marathon my whole life and I was now running it I remain clear to my mission that fiction matters in fiction we can find the friends we need if we are lucky we can find small moments of Grace if we are lucky when my daughter was very small she lined up all her stuffed animals one day in her room and she said Mommy come look and she put her sweaty little hand in mine and said with a sweep of her other hand these are my friends and I have never forgotten that my hope is that my characters that I have written will become friends to my readers the way so many characters have become friends in all the books I have read over the years it has been such an honor here to speak with you today about my very slow Beginnings thank you so much [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]