1. “I wonder why people never say anything real,” Artie says to Evie after a party. Later in the novel, he comes to his own conclusions about why. Why do you think it’s so tempting to keep conversations at surface level? What do we gain when we do choose to go deeper?

2. Do you believe Artie experienced precognition when he dreamt of the water before his accident? Why or why not? Have you ever had an experience that felt similarly uncanny? Discuss.

3. What are some of the themes you noticed in this novel?

4. What is it about Artie that touches his students so deeply, even years later? Who was your favorite teacher growing up --- and what do you think sets them apart from the others in your memory?

5. What secrets are each of the characters hiding from other people? From themselves?

6. When these secrets are revealed, how are characters’ relationships and self-perceptions affected?

7. “He had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.” What does this quotation mean to you? To what extend do you think we can truly know another person?

8. How does Artie and Evie’s relationship evolve over the course of the novel? Artie and Rob’s? Evie and Rob’s? How does their family dynamic as a whole shift?

9. Elizabeth Strout’s characters (like Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton and now Artie Dam), tend to be ordinary people living seemingly unremarkable lives. Yet as their hopes, memories and fears come alive on the page, their ordinariness becomes something extraordinary. How do you think Strout accomplishes this?

10. What scene or passage from THE THINGS WE NEVER SAY has stayed with you longest? Why?