Elizabeth Strout: ‘It’s a tough thing to be creative and have children’

After Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author is back with a brand new protagonist in her 11th novel, ‘The Things We Never Say’. The chronicler of small-town despair, loved by Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith, tells Jessie Thompson why her books are so full of loneliness (but she’s not lonely herself)