Elizabeth Stroud, welcome to the show. We're very old friends you and I and I call you Liz so I will do that today.

And it's nice to be here Meg with you as well, so thank you.

My pleasure. First of all, big congratulations on the recent news that your novel O William made the long list for the Booker Prize.

Thank you. Thank you very much. That's wonderful.

And you have a new novel coming out, Lucy By the Sea.

Right. But today we're going to talk about your story home. So Annie Appleby, she's a character that you're revisiting here.

Right. And you've created this whole ecosystem for your characters to live in. Did that start intentionally or did that just grow?

It just grew. I had no intention of doing it, but I just realized as I started to work on one

story that, oh look, it's connected in some way and it was just fun for me to find

these different connections as long as they were organically already there waiting for me to

discover them. What did you want to find out about Annie and her mother?

In the story Home, it was very interesting for me to think of a woman at that point in her life

of having to go into a home.

And there's a friend of mine here in Maine who deals with situations like that all the time,

and I talk to her about the process of somebody like that going into a home and that she explained

to me that it was done gradually.

I just got very interested in that and seemed to me that it would fall on Annie because she's Annie, you know, and she's got a different life now.

And so she's got to come up and do that because her sister's just not capable of it.

In your story's Snowblind, where these characters also appear, you have this beautiful line.

What Annie did not say was that there were many ways of not knowing things.

Her own experience over the years now spread like a piece of knitting in her lap with shadows all through it.

Such an exquisite line in it and not knowing that's so central to the story home.

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