My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel by Elizabeth Strout (Epub)

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the tender relationship between mother and daughter in this extraordinary novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys.Soon to be a Broadway play starring Laura Linney produced by Manhattan Theatre Club and London Theatre Company • LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE •NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The New York Times Book Review • NPR • BookPage • LibraryReads • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.Praise for My Name Is Lucy Barton “A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”—The Boston Globe“It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful.”—San Francisco Chronicle“A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one.”—Newsday“Spectacular . . . Smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.”—Lily King,The Washington Post “An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion.”—People

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “There is not a scintilla of sentimentality in this exquisite novel. Instead, in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to—‘I was so happy. Oh, I was happy’—simple joy.”—Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review “Spectacular . . . My Name Is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.”—Lily King, The Washington Post “My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds. . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one.”—Marion Winik, Newsday “Lucy Barton is . . . potent with distilled emotion. Without a hint of self-pity, Strout captures the ache of loneliness we all feel sometimes.”—Time “An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion.”—People “A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”—The Boston Globe “Sensitive, deceptively simple . . . Strout captures the pull between the ruthlessness required to write without restraint and the necessity of accepting others’ flaws. It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful. . . . My Name Is Lucy Barton—like all of Strout’s fiction—is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Strout maps the complex terrain of human relationships by focusing on that which is often unspoken and only implied. . . . [My Name Is Lucy Barton is] a powerful addition to Strout’s body of work.”—The Seattle Times “Impressionistic and haunting . . . Much of the joy of reading Lucy Barton comes from piecing together the hints and half-revelations in Strout’s unsentimental but compelling prose, especially as you begin to grasp the nature of a bond in which everything important is left unsaid. . . . Strout paints an indelible, grueling portrait of poverty and abuse that’s all the more unnerving for her reticence. With My Name Is Lucy Barton, she reminds us of the power of our stories—and our ability to transcend our troubled narratives.”—Miami Herald “Lovely and heartbreaking . . . a major work in minimalist form . . . In the character of Lucy, Strout has fashioned one of the great resilient modern heroines.”—Portland Press-Herald “Strout has proven once again that she is a master of creating unforgettable characters. . . . Her stories open themselves to the reader in a way that is familiar and relatable, but then she delivers these zingers and we marvel at her talent.”—The Post and Courier “Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue.”—Hilary Mantel “Magnificent.”—Ann Patchett Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of January 2016: Do not be misled by the slimness of this volume, the quietness of its prose, the seeming simplicity of its story line: Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton is as powerful and disturbing as the best of Strout’s work, including the Pulitzer Prizewinning Olive Kitteridge. In fact, it bears much resemblance to that novel– and to Strout’s debut Amy and Isabelle–in that it deals with small-town women, who are always more complicated than they seem and often less likable than many contemporary heroines. Here, Strout tells the story of a thirtysomething wife and mother who is in the hospital for longer than she expected, recovering from an operation. She’s not dying, but her situation is serious enough that her mother– whom she has not seen in many years– arrives at her bedside. The two begin to talk. Their style is undramatic, gentle– just the simple unspooling of memories between women not generally given to sharing them; still, the accumulation of detail and the repetitive themes of longing and lifelong missed connections add up to revelations that, in another writer’s heavy hands, might be melodramatic. In Strout’s they are anything but. Rarely has a book been louder in its silences, or more plainly and completely devastating. –Sara Nelson –This text refers to the hardcover edition. About the Author Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge, as well as The Burgess Boys, a New York Times bestseller; Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick; and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. Elizabeth Strout lives in New York City. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks. This was in New York City, and at night a view of the Chrysler Building, with its geometric brilliance of lights, was directly visible from my bed. During the day, the building’s beauty receded, and gradually it became simply one more large structure against a blue sky, and all the city’s buildings seemed remote, silent, far away. It was May, and then June, and I remember how I would stand and look out the window at the sidewalk below and watch the young women—my age—in their spring clothes, out on their lunch breaks; I could see their heads moving in conversation, their blouses rippling in the breeze. I thought how when I got out of the hospital I would never again walk down the sidewalk without giving thanks for being one of those people, and for many years I did that—I would remember the view from the hospital window and be glad for the sidewalk I was walking on.To begin with, it was a simple story: I had gone into the hospital to have my appendix out. After two days they gave me food, but I couldn’t keep it down. And then a fever arrived. No one could isolate any bacteria or figure out what had gone wrong. No one ever did. I took fluids through one IV, and antibiotics came through another. They were attached to a metal pole on wobbly wheels that I pushed around with me, but I got tired easily. Toward the beginning of July, whatever problem had taken hold of me went away. But until then I was in a very strange state—a literally feverish waiting—and I really agonized. I had a husband and two small daughters at home; I missed my girls terribly, and I worried about them so much I was afraid it was making me sicker. When my doctor, to whom I felt a deep attachment—he was a jowly-faced Jewish man who wore such a gentle sadness on his shoulders, whose grandparents and three aunts, I heard him tell a nurse, had been killed in the camps, and who had a wife and four grown children here in New York City—this lovely man, I think, felt sorry for me, and saw to it that my girls—they were five and six—could visit me if they had no illnesses. They were brought into my room by a family friend, and I saw how their little faces were dirty, and so was their hair, and I pushed my IV apparatus into the shower with them, but they cried out, “Mommy, you’re so skinny!” They were really frightened. They sat with me on the bed while I dried their hair with a towel, and then they drew pictures, but with apprehension, meaning that they did not interrupt themselves every minute by saying, “Mommy, Mommy, do you like this? Mommy, look at the dress of my fairy princess!” They said very little, the younger one especially seemed unable to speak, and when I put my arms around her, I saw her lower lip thrust out and her chin tremble; she was a tiny thing, trying so hard to be brave. When they left I did not look out the window to watch them walk away with my friend who had brought them, and who had no children of her own.My husband, naturally, was busy running the household and also busy with his job, and he didn’t often have a chance to visit me. He had told me when we met that he hated hospitals—his father had died in one when he was fourteen—and I saw now that he meant this. In the first room I had been assigned was an old woman dying next to me; she kept calling out for help—it was striking to me how uncaring the nurses were, as she cried that she was dying. My husband could not stand it—he could not stand visiting me there, is what I mean—and he had me moved to a single room. Our health insurance didn’t cover this luxury, and every day was a drain on our savings. I was grateful not to hear that poor woman crying out, but had anyone known the extent of my loneliness I would have been embarrassed. Whenever a nurse came to take my temperature, I tried to get her to stay for a few minutes, but the nurses were busy, they could not just hang around talking.About three weeks after I was admitted, I turned my eyes from the window late one afternoon and found my mother sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed. “Mom?” I said.“Hi, Lucy,” she said. Her voice sounded shy but urgent. She leaned forward and squeezed my foot through the sheet. “Hi, Wizzle,” she said. I had not seen my mother for years, and I kept staring at her; I could not figure out why she looked so different.“Mom, how did you get here?” I asked.“Oh, I got on an airplane.” She wiggled her fingers, and I knew that there was too much emotion for us. So I waved back, and lay flat. “I think you’ll be all right,” she added, in the same shy-sounding but urgent voice. “I haven’t had any dreams.”Her being there, using my pet name, which I had not heard in ages, made me feel warm and liquid-filled, as though all my tension had been a solid thing and now was not. Usually I woke at midnight and dozed fitfully, or stared wide-awake through the window at the lights of the city. But that night I slept without waking, and in the morning my mother was sitting where she had been the day before. “Doesn’t matter,” she said when I asked. “You know I don’t sleep lots.”The nurses offered to bring her a cot, but she shook her head. Every time a nurse offered to bring her a cot, she shook her head. After a while, the nurses stopped asking. My mother stayed with me five nights, and she never slept but in her chair.During our first full day together my mother and I talked intermittently; I think neither of us quite knew what to do. She asked me a few questions about my girls, and I answered with my face becoming hot. “They’re amazing,” I said. “Oh, they’re just amazing.” About my husband, my mother asked nothing, even though—he told me this on the telephone—he was the one who had called her and asked her to come be with me, who had paid her airfare, who had offered to pick her up at the airport—my mother, who had never been in an airplane before. In spite of her saying she would take a taxi, in spite of her refusal to see him face-to-face, my husband had still given her guidance and money to get to me. Now, sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed, my mother also said nothing about my father, and so I said nothing about him either. I kept wishing she would say “Your father hopes you get better,” but she did not.“Was it scary getting a taxi, Mom?”She hesitated, and I felt that I saw the terror that must have visited her when she stepped off the plane. But she said, “I have a tongue in my head, and I used it.”After a moment I said, “I’m really glad you’re here.”She smiled quickly and looked toward the window.This was the middle of the 1980s, before cellphones, and when the beige telephone next to my bed rang and it was my husband—my mother could tell, I’m sure, by the pitiful way I said “Hi,” as though ready to weep—my mother would quietly rise from her chair and leave the room. I suppose during those times she found food in the cafeteria, or called my father from a pay phone down the hall, since I never saw her eat, and since I assumed my father wondered over her safety—there was no problem, as far as I understood it, between them—and after I had spoken to each child, kissing the phone mouthpiece a dozen times, then lying back onto the pillow and closing my eyes, my mother would slip back into the room, for when I opened my eyes she would be there.That first day we spoke of my brother, the eldest of us three siblings, who, unmarried, lived at home with my parents, though he was thirty-six, and of my older sister, who was thirty-four and who lived ten miles from my parents, with five children and a husband. I asked if my brother had a job. “He has no job,” my mother said. “He spends the night with any animal that will be killed the next day.” I asked her what she had said, and she repeated what she had said. She added, “He goes into the Pedersons’ barn, and he sleeps next to the pigs that will be taken to slaughter.” I was surprised to hear this, and I said so, and my mother shrugged.Then my mother and I talked about the nurses; my mother named them right away: “Cookie,” for the skinny one who was crispy in her affect; “Toothache,” for the woebegone older one; “Serious Child,” for the Indian woman we both liked.But I was tired, and so my mother started telling me stories of people she had known years before. She talked in a way I didn’t remember, as though a pressure of feeling and words and observations had been stuffed down inside her for years, and her voice was breathy and unselfconscious. Sometimes I dozed off, and when I woke I would beg her to talk again. But she said, “Oh, Wizzle-dee, you need your rest.”“I am resting! Please, Mom. Tell me something. Tell me anything. Tell me about Kathie Nicely. I always loved her name.”“Oh yes. Kathie Nicely. Goodness, she came to a bad end.”We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois, where there were other homes that were run-down and lacking fresh paint or shutters or gardens, no beauty for the eye to rest upon. These houses were grouped together in what was the town, but our house was not near them. While it is said that children accept their circumstances as normal, both Vicky and I understood that we were different. We were told on the playground by other children, “Your family stinks,” and they’d run off pinching their noses with their fingers; my sister was told by her second-grade teacher—in front of the class—that being poor was no excuse for having dirt behind the ears, no one was too poor to buy a bar of soap. My father worked on farm machinery, though he was often getting fired for disagreeing with the boss, then getting rehired again, I think because he was good at the work and would be needed once more. My mother took in sewing: A hand-painted sign, where our long driveway met the road, announced SEWING AND ALTERATIONS. And though my father, when he said our prayers with us at night, made us thank God that we had enough food, the fact is I was often ravenous, and what we had for supper many nights was molasses on bread. Telling a lie and wasting food were always things to be punished for. Otherwise, on occasion and without warning, my parents—and it was usually my mother and usually in the presence of our father—struck us impulsively and vigorously, as I think some people may have suspected by our splotchy skin and sullen dispositions.And there was isolation.We lived in the Sauk Valley Area, where you can go for a long while seeing only one or two houses surrounded by fields, and as I have said, we didn’t have houses near us. We lived with cornfields and fields of soybeans spreading to the horizon; and yet beyond the horizon was the Pedersons’ pig farm. In the middle of the cornfields stood one tree, and its starkness was striking. For many years I thought that tree was my friend; it was my friend. Our home was down a very long dirt road, not far from the Rock River, near some trees that were windbreaks for the cornfields. So we did not have any neighbors nearby. And we did not have a television and we did not have newspapers or magazines or books in the house. The first year of her marriage, my mother had worked at the local library, and apparently—my brother later told me this—loved books. But then the library told my mother the regulations had changed, they could only hire someone with a proper education. My mother never believed them. She stopped reading, and many years went by before she went to a different library in a different town and brought home books again. I mention this because there is the question of how children become aware of what the world is, and how to act in it.How, for example, do you learn that it is impolite to ask a couple why they have no children? How do you set a table? How do you know if you are chewing with your mouth open if no one has ever told you? How do you even know what you look like if the only mirror in the house is a tiny one high above the kitchen sink, or if you have never heard a living soul say that you are pretty, but rather, as your breasts develop, are told by your mother that you are starting to look like one of the cows in the Pedersons’ barn?How Vicky managed, to this day I don’t know. We were not as close as you might expect; we were equally friendless and equally scorned, and we eyed each other with the same suspicion with which we eyed the rest of the world. There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too—unexpected—when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is a story about the human condition. Of happiness. And sadness. Of love. And hate. This is a story of life–childhood, marriage, motherhood. It’s all here in a very short book that will grab your heart and not let go. It is a simple story written in exquisite prose with a sophisticated message. This is as nearly perfect as a novel can ever be.Now living in New York City, Lucy Barton recalls one brief time in her life when she was hospitalized in Manhattan with a mysterious infection. While in her hospital bed, she recalls her impoverished childhood life in rural Amgash, Illinois and the people who influenced her as she grew to adulthood–from the school janitor to her abusive and dysfunctional parents to a college professor with whom she had an affair to her husband. It is so engrossing and meaningful. Much in this book will make you pause and think.This is the prequel to “Anything Is Possible,” which is a series of stories about the people in Amgash with Lucy Barton as a thread throughout. Do read “My Name Is Lucy Barton” first to fully appreciate “Anything Is Possible.”Aside to Elizabeth Strout: YOU are a ruthless writer!Aside to Everyone Else: Read the book, and you will know why this is a compliment.

⭐I read and enjoyed Olive Kittredge and The Burgess Boys, so was quite excited about a new novel from this talented author. Unfortunately Lucy the character did not appeal to me and, by extension, neither did Lucy Barton the book. I suspect the style of prose in which she was delivered to me was the issue, not so much her life story or life choices or world views. In fact, by all accounts I suppose she should be lauded for coming from such humble beginnings and “making something of herself.” And yet I felt detached and vaguely annoyed by her! The author seemed to employ a literary “technique” here, presumably intended to create an image of how a rural, uneducated (or at least unworldly), homespun girl would think, talk and act. It involved a lot of simple sentences, often repeated a second time but with a few words added on. Often those words were “is what I am trying to say.” In the end it felt overworked and clichéd, and kind of made me want to shake Lucy (or more accurately, Strout) and say “how about throwing in a compound sentence now and again!” And it made Lucy feel flat and one-dimensional. It is by no means the worst book I have read. Just the worst book by Strout.

⭐“I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”My Name Is Lucy Barton tells the story of a woman, named Lucy, as she recovers from an illness and tries to make sense of/peace with her complicated relationship with her mother. Lucy was raised in extreme poverty by parents who were not able to nurture and show her love in the manner that most children need. These circumstances have a fundamental and lasting impact on Lucy’s understanding of people, including herself, her choices, and the woman she is.The novel is written from Lucy’s point of view and comes across as a mix of a diary, vignettes of events, puzzles with half-revealed truths, but mostly, her own “one true story”. Strout uses language sparsely and with restraint. The novel is a short 191 pages that can be read quickly but should be savored slowly. The details are minimal and pared down to only the essentials. However, those pages resonate with a profusion of intense emotion and the vulnerability of the human condition. Loneliness, longing, pain, and inferiority are all felt strongly throughout the novel but so are resilience and love. At one point Lucy says “I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now”. Strout filled this novel with true sentences. The novel summarizes itself nicely with the quotation “This is a story about love, … This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly.” I highly recommend this novel and suspect that Lucy will stay with you long after you have finished reading it.

⭐There really isn’t a story here. It is a stream of consciousness that points out to the reader how much one’s past life influences one’s present and future. Although it was well written, with some quite nice descriptive passages, truthfully, I could never get into it. I kept wondering when the story would be revealed, when it would start. There was no story. We never discover why she was in the hospital for so long, nor what happens with her mother, nor, really what she went through as a child. Strange book.

⭐‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ is a little book at 191 pages in the paperback edition but it’s an insightful one. The story is snapshots of Lucy’s very poor, isolated childhood and the scars such conditions cause. Despite Lucy “Wizzle” Barton being married and raising two children, she still feels lonely. While her estrangement from her parents and siblings seem like the ingredients for a depressing read, the author’s insights and descriptions are well worth diving into ‘My Name is Lucy Barton.’Ms. Strout writes in her book, “… that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.” While the description does not hold true for all fiction, it certainly does in ‘My Name is Lucy Barton.’ No matter our upbringings, they are an integral part of a person’s being and remain so throughout their lives. Ms. Strout has created a thought-provoking work that may help the reader see themselves in it.

⭐Ill in a New York hospital in the mid-1980s, without her husband or her two small daughters, writer Lucy Barton is surprised one day to find her mother has flown in from the Mid-West and is sitting by her bedside. The two haven’t spoken in several years, but despite their long period of non-contact, they cautiously reconnect as Lucy drifts in out of consciousness. Lucy’s mother’s refusal to leave her daughter’s bedside suggests maternal devotion – but Lucy’s memories of her childhood paint a different picture, a picture of chaotic poverty and erratic, sometimes abusive parenting. Lucy is now a successful writer but back then ‘We were oddities,’ she says, and the loneliness that resulted is almost palpable: ‘In the middle of the cornfields stood one tree, and its starkness was striking. For many years I thought that tree was my friend; it was my friend.’My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short, sparse novel and every word, every incident related is carefully chosen. There’s a veil of ambiguity over the whole novel that made me constantly question what I was reading. It’s clear that Lucy’s mother, Lydia, remembers certain things very differently to the way Lucy does. Was Lucy’s childhood really as bad as she believes it to have been, or – as someone who tells stories for a living – is she creating an embellished narrative to express some other, even deeper problem? There’s an extra layer of uncertainty, too, as Lucy is looking back on her hospital stay and relating her conversations with her mother to us at a much later date, long after the two children she worries about while in hospital have grown up. We’re not just relying on memories: we’re relying on memories of memories. What, exactly, are the vague, undiagnosed complications she’s suffering after her appendectomy – and is it just a coincidence that, having spent her childhood wary of a volatile, disturbed father, she is almost obsessively attached to the kind, calm and paternal doctor who oversees her care? Lucy may have left behind her traumatic past for New York, comfortable affluence and literary acclaim, but she’ll never be able to escape her family’s influence completely, and her relationship with her own daughters seems far from clear-cut.It’s not often that a novel says so much in so few words. Strout’s prose is beautifully economical and Lucy’s recollections are shaped by her traumatic experiences, some of which she is clearly repressing, so what’s left out is sometimes just as important as what’s included. This is a thoughtful exploration of fractured, complicated family relationships and the ripple effect of childhood poverty and neglect through the generations.

⭐I remember hearing praises for this book when it was first published but I did’t read it at the time.I have so many books, some of which I buy just because the reviews are incredible, but I would lie if I say I read them all, they are on the shelf, waiting for me to take the first step.This book is different, I bought it because I went to the theatre a few months back to see the play with Laura Linney and I was so deeply touched by her performance!it made me want to re live the story, a story that I feel belongs to all of us, one way or another, about families, our relationship with our parents,our fears, our lives and how everything comes full circle at the end. Always.Elisabeth Strout doesn’t write a story, she whispers it to our ears to remind us that it’s alright to cry and be human and scared. One of the best.

⭐This deeply personal novel, like Strout’s Pulitzer winner, “Olive Kitteridge”, is a composite rendering of perspectives that give us a multi-layered and nuanced presentation of the character, all the seeming contradictions and pieces that seem not to fit and yet all the more authentic and true of human personalities.While narrated solely through Lucy Barton’s voice, unlike the multiple voices in “OK”, Lucy’s voice is uncertain, prone to revision and wavering, as she looks back on her long hospital stay as a young wife and mother. Her mother’s visit triggers stark memories of her impoverished (and possibly abusive) childhood and informs her ambivalent relationship with her mother, as she sees both of them through others’ eyes.Written like a confessional or a memoir, the novel is made up of moments, side stories, recounted conversations, ponderings, stitched together. Lucy tells of her struggles as a fledgling writer, and her determination to write what is real, following the advice of a writer that “if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right”. What comes through in Lucy’s own narrative about her family is her inability at times to do just that as she reports on her parents’ neglect and abuse, but which is mingled with apology and excuses made in their behalf as she also tries to show the tender side to them, which gives her whole writing exercise a metafictive slant, revealing much about Lucy Barton herself. She reminds the reader at several points in the story that this is not a story about her marriage and yet it seeps through, over and over again, as it is part of her story and cannot be left out.A quietly moving novel, that draws the reader in to all the hopes, fears and dreams of a character in all her vulnerability and brokenness, as she finds a way to grab onto herself and define who she is.

⭐I found the central core of this book – the relationship between Lucy Barton and her mother – very unconvincing.Lucy’s mother had come from Illinois to New York City to visit her daughter, who was in hospital there, with unexplained complications after an appendectomy. They had not seen each other for many years; but the mother stayed by her bed, day and night, for five days, cat-napping in the chair by the bed. She never asked her daughter anything about her life, and instead reminisced about her own childhood and, quite inconsequentially, about a number of people she knew.On the fifth day, Lucy had an X-ray, and her doctor saw a blockage, and said she might need surgery. Her mother then left abruptly, against Lucy’s protests. Lucy had no memory of her mother kissing her good-bye or indeed of her ever having kissed her. Lucy would see her only once more in her life – nine years later, when her mother was terminally ill.Is that a credible relationship?Lucy has her own reminiscences, some of them as inconsequential as her mother’s; but other, more interesting ones, are about her own childhood. These were only mental reminiscences, since her mother did not ask her anything about her life.Her father had worked on a farm. The family was very poor and lived in an unheated garage. Lucy had spent a lot of time after hours in her school, where it was warm. She was an ardent reader and so successful a student that she had won a free place at a college outside Chicago, and eventually became writer.It was at the college that she had met William, who was working there as a lab assistant. She had married him when she was twenty, and they had two daughters. William was the son of a German prisoner of war and the wife of a farmer for whom he had been working. Lucy’s father was ill at ease with his son-in-law: he had fought in the Second World War, and felt guilty for the rest of his life at having shot two young German civilians, and the blond William looked like one of them.It turned out that Lucy did not need surgery; and, after another five weeks, she was allowed home.William had come a few times to visit her in hospital. He had been left a lot of money, and the couple were now well off. When Lucy’s novels came out, they were a great and profitable success. We are told, without any details, that her and William’s marriage would be bad; that she would leave him and their daughters, and that they would both remarry, in her case a man who had also been born in great poverty, but who had become a brilliant cello player That story will be told by Elizabeth Strout in a later book, “Oh William!”Unsatisfactory as I found the depiction of the mother-daughter relationship, I was sufficiently interested in Lucy to want to read that sequel.

⭐I previously read “Anything is Possible” by this author and was annoyed that what was presented as a novel in the “blurb” was actually a series of short stories about (apparently) people who came from/lived in Amgash, the hometown of Lucy Barton. (There were plenty of other reasons I didn’t enjoy it). However, I decided to give the author another chance by reading this “award winning” book.Again, I expected to find a novel, but I’m not even sure I would call this a book. Very brief – only 191 pages, large text, and lots of empty space. Some of the “chapters” were only one paragraph! The chapters consisted of a series of vignettes, almost conversations between the central character (who was herself an author; convenient) and her mother, or with the reader. I felt no connection with any of the characters in this series of vignettes. The only positive aspect (if you could call it that) was that I had several ah-ha moments, as I recognised names from the “Anything is Possible” chapters.I was really expecting this book to be the story of Lucy Barton, but it wasn’t (at all). It was Lucy Barton having conversations with herself.I think Elizabeth Strout must be one of those Marmite authors who lots of people love but a substantial minority don’t like at all. Count me in the latter. I won’t be giving her another chance. Two strikes and you’re out.

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