“By the time I went to college, I had seen two movies: ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ and ‘The Miracle Worker.’ ” Strout’s family still owns the house, and as she walked in the front yard-which isn’t really a yard so much as a perch among the pine trees, on a rocky outcropping high above Casco Bay-she said, “It’s a long way from nowhere.”Īnd so she left. They didn’t drink or smoke or watch television they didn’t get the newspaper. “My parents came from many generations of New Englanders, and they were skeptical of pleasure,” Strout has written. “I just don’t think I existed for them on any level.” In her mind, they came from places where a person wouldn’t feel so stuck-as Strout did, in the house that her parents had built next to her grandmother’s cottage, down a dirt road from her two great-aunts. “They’d come in with their tennis racquets, and I would want so much to be friends with them,” she said. Strout longed to be one of them-these people who were free to experience the world beyond New England. I think my mother felt like the person was . . . “And this woman came by, and she goes, ‘Oh, you’re so cute! Can I take a picture?’ My mother was furious.

“I remember sitting on the front porch eating a lollipop,” Strout, who is sixty-one, said one damp day in March, as she drove past.

It passes clapboard houses and mobile homes, stands of red-tipped sumac and pine, a few farms, a white Congregational church, and the Harpswell Historical Society, which used to be Bailey’s country store, when the writer Elizabeth Strout worked there as a teen-ager. Just outside the town of Brunswick, Maine, the Harpswell Road runs along a finger of land poking into the ocean. Photograph by Joss McKinley for The New Yorker

“I often felt that I had been born in the wrong place,” Strout says.

Jim tierney elizabeth strout