I’d spotted Elizabeth Strout’s books on library shelves and bookstore displays for years without ever picking one up. The Things We Never Say finally pulled me in, and it turned out to be my introduction to her writing. The synopsis interested me right away: Artie’s isolation, his anger at the world, the sense that life had been keeping secrets from him.

Once I started reading, Artie pulled me in even deeper. His inner world is a tangle of questions and contradictions: does free will exist, is he lonely enough to die, can he find a reason to stay? Watching him drift from wanting to disappear toward slowly choosing life again felt earned, with no forced beats along the way.

The title says it all. The Things We Never Say gives voice to the things most of us keep tucked away, especially in a moment like today. People hungry for authority as well as the weight of discrimination. The way these public anxieties seep into our private lives and shape how we speak to the people we love. Strout packages it all inside the everyday of small scenes, ordinary characters, situations we recognize from our own lives, or roles we’ve stepped into ourselves without noticing. Artie being a history teacher adds another layer, since his classroom and his personal life keep brushing up against each other. The political and social backdrop feels lived-in because, well, it’s the one we’re actually living through right now.

The writing style itself is lovely. Strout sprinkles wise lines throughout the book that catch you off guard in the best way. The story stays light on the surface while running deep underneath, and I enjoyed every page of it.

Unfortuntely, a few plot beats land in the middle of the book that I think would have hit harder near the end. Once I read them, the emotional texture of everything that followed shifted for me. My imagination started running ahead, and I read the rest of the story through the lens of those reveals. The book still held me. Some of the surprise just dulled along the way.

I highly recommend picking this one up. A light read with heavy thoughts tucked inside the story.

My Favorite Bits

• No one is superior to anyone else in this world.

• We all think there is free will, but what if there isn’t?

• All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others.

• I did not want to die, I just did not want to live.

• So blind we humans are—so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone. (..) But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own. Thinking all the while that we can see.

• Artie still felt a lingering sense of shame: He had lied to his students. They could not bring about world peace. No one could.

• “Why don’t people ever say anything real?” Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand. It was a private thing, to be alive.

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Author: Elizabeth Strout
Publication date: 5 May 2026
Number of pages: 224 pages

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