Author of "Amy and Isabelle"

February 18, 1999

Acclaimed writer Elizabeth Strout chats about her first novel, "Amy and Isabelle." Strout sheds light about the difficulties of mother-daughter relationships-the premise of her book-and discusses coping with family secrets and the rituals of the writing life.

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CCCoach: Welcome to NetCafeLive, where we host authors and celebrities through out the month. Thanks for joining us! Borders NetCafeLive is a joint production of Borders.com (tm) and Talk City(tm), a Talk City, Inc. Production. Tonight's guest is Elizabeth Strout, here to talk about her new book "Amy and Isabelle," a story about a mother and daughter trying to come to terms with with their desires and and with each other. Amy is a high school student who falls in love with her math teacher. Borders.com and Talkcity.com is pleased to welcome tonight's guest. Welcome to Talk City! .

Elizabeth Strout: Thank you very much for inviting me!

CCCoach: Good evening Elizabeth and welcome to Talk City. For those joining us who have not read the book yet can you give us a small synopsis of its content?

Elizabeth Strout: It's a book about secrets and specifically a single mother who lives with her teenage daughter. The daughter has a secret life with her high school teacher, and when Isabelle finds out about this, of course a crisis ensues. The book is about Amy and Isabelle having to come to terms about their secrets and also involving secrets of different people in town as well.

CCCoach: Can you tell us what drew you to writing this book and why?

Elizabeth Strout: I had an image in my mind of a scene where a mother is punishing her daughter by cutting off her hair. Although where this scene came from, I don't know. It must have been told to me a long time ago, because it was something I had never experienced the scene stayed with me, so I had to figure out what the daughter had done and why the mother responded with what she did. The story unfolded, bit by bit from that scene.

CCCoach: Is this book something like a Peyton Place from the 60's?

Elizabeth Strout: I have never read "Peyton Place." Apparently a reviewer has compared it to that, but I have never read that.

CCCoach: Does this book carry any kind of relation to your own life, if so in what way?

Elizabeth Strout: The book reflects all sorts of different aspects of myself in all the different characters. The book is not autobiographical, it's imagined. The imagination of course is fed by true experiences. Things in the book are made up, but the emotions are not made up.

CCCoach: Your book talks about Amy falling in love with her high school teacher; can you tell us how old she is when this happened and give us an idea of how deep this love was or was it just an infatuation?

Elizabeth Strout: For Amy, it was a very, very deep love which is part of the exploration of adolescence in the book; the intensity of feelings that adolescents can have. I believe she was 15 at the time this occurred in the book. Certainly, a significant theme in the book is the intensity of the feelings that these younger women can have for older men.

CCCoach: How did Isabelle cope with her daughter falling in love with a teacher?

Elizabeth Strout: She reacts first with anger and then explores her own fears and secrets, she was able to come to Amy as a more loving parent.

MysteryGirl: How long does it take you to write.to put thoughts down on paper?

Elizabeth Strout: A long time. The book took me six or seven years, although the first few years were spent mostly to try to understand who the characters were. I will often rewrite obsessively to get a paragraph to be the way I want it to be. I had stopped writing stories when I began to realize that this was going to be something bigger than a story, and it was the only thing I had worked on at that time . I was also teaching part-time. In terms of writing, that was the only thing I was working on.

CCCoach: Does this book delve into any abuses that Amy may have suffered at the hands of her Mother or Father?

Elizabeth Strout: It delves into her history as a child . I don't know if I would choose the word abuse as she never knew her Father. and her Mother raised her alone. It certainly explores her childhood to some extent.

CCCoach: How about Isabelle? How much did you explore her life including childhood?

Elizabeth Strout: Isabelle gets explored a great deal, particularly as the book moves on. I found her to actually turn out to be quite an interesting character. She, probably more than any other character in the book has her story fully told.

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