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Exploring Family Trauma in “My Name Is Lucy Barton”

By Alexandra Schwartz

On the subject of his vocation, Philip Roth liked to quote Czeslaw Milosz : “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished.” It’s a great aphorism, pithy and cavalier, as emphatic as a gunshot. To write is to declare a loyalty that runs deeper than blood, to make a pledge to the self and its expression; to write well is to tell the truth about what you have seen, starting with where—and who—you come from. That, anyway, is what Milosz, and Roth, felt, and they make the selfishness at the heart of a writer’s life sound like the glorious liberation it is. But there’s also a riskier exposure at stake. The writer who bares others’ secrets must also bare her own, standing vulnerable before the people who purport to know her best. When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished, not just because the child is bound to tell the truth about her parents but because she must tell the truth about herself.

Elizabeth Strout’s novel “ My Name Is Lucy Barton ” is the story of a writer reckoning with the legacy of a scarred family life and slowly coming to terms with the costs and the rewards of her art. When Lucy is in her early twenties and newly married, she moves with her husband to New York, where they live in the West Village. Lucy is from Amgash, Illinois, more of a pinprick on the map than a town proper, and she grew up poor, sharing a single room with her brother, her sister, and her parents, a seamstress and a repairman of farm machinery; there was no heat, no toilet, and never enough to eat. Lucy got good grades, though, and escaped to Chicago on a scholarship. And she began writing stories. Two have been published, but she is shy about saying so. A neighbor takes an interest in her and, when he learns what she does, advises her to be ruthless. Lucy is caught short. “I did not think I was or could be ruthless,” she tells us. How she learns to become so is the subject of this quiet yet surprisingly fierce book.

“My Name Is Lucy Barton” was published in 2016 and quickly landed at the top of the Times best-seller list, bumping down “ The Girl on the Train ,” a thriller about a scorned, alcoholic woman, and “ All the Light We Cannot See ,” a historical heart-tugger about a blind one. Evidently, people also wanted to read about a more familiar sort of woman, a type almost too recognizable to warrant sustained attention—that is, one who suffers doubt but holds out hope for clarity, who applies herself imperfectly but insistently to the task of living.

Now they can see her, too, in the form of Laura Linney, who stars in a one-woman adaptation of Strout’s novel (directed by Richard Eyre, at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman). The set, designed by Bob Crowley, is minimal. A single hospital bed and a utilitarian, nondescript armchair occupy the stage. Behind the furniture are three nested screens, onto which are alternately projected the Chrysler Building—faintly shimmering by day, a bright beacon in the murky city sky by night—and the corn and soy fields of Lucy’s childhood, explosively green, as if touched up with Hulk-colored food dye. (Luke Halls did the video design.) Linney, in tapered slacks and a long, loose cardigan, strides out, to inevitable applause—the audience sits onstage as well as in the house—and, as Lucy, speaks directly to us. Some years ago, she says, she came to the hospital with a ruptured appendix and developed a mysterious and undiagnosed illness that kept her there for nine weeks. (This was in the mid-eighties, during the height of the aids epidemic; later, she will tell us of seeing a hospital door marked with a yellow sticker, a sign of plague within.) Her husband rarely came to see her, and, when her two young daughters visited, they were brought by a family friend. Lucy’s only regular contact was with a kind doctor, who seemed to feel fatherly toward her, visiting her daily, beyond the normal call of duty.

Then, one day, she woke to find her mother sitting in the chair by her bed. It had been years since Lucy had seen her; she had never before come to New York. Lucy’s mother—we don’t learn her name—is an ambiguous presence, part comfort, part threat. She calls Lucy by her childhood pet name, Wizzle; Linney distinguishes her with a cragged, smoky voice, whose flattened “a”s and sanded “r”s supposedly signal northern Illinois. (This New Yorker’s limited ear would have pegged her as a Bostonian.) She’s withholding and Midwestern proud, but, when Lucy asks for stories of home, her mother obliges, telling tales of Amgash and its people, which she seasons with bitter humor and a dash of Schadenfreude. There’s Kathie Nicely, for instance, a wealthy woman whose dresses Lucy’s mother sewed, who ends up divorced by her husband, abandoned by her lover, and despised by her children, and Mississippi Mary, whose fate, on discovering her husband’s infidelity, is just as bleak. What Lucy’s mother doesn’t like to talk about is the Bartons. How Lucy’s father, who returned from the Second World War with post-traumatic stress disorder, flew into unstoppable panics and brutally humiliated Lucy’s brother. How Lucy’s mother herself beat the children. How Lucy, when she was very young, was locked in the family truck while her parents went to work, an ordeal that Lucy can’t address with her mother, and instead describes to us:

I cried until I could hardly breathe. Once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make. I have left the subway car I was riding in so I did not have to hear a child crying that way.

Strout’s language, deftly adapted for the stage by Rona Munro, is simple in the way of a coiled pot or a Shaker chair, a solid, unfussy construction whose elegance lies in its polished unity, and Linney, radiating warmth and lucidity, is just the right actor to bring it to life. Winding through dense tracts of script, her ninety-minute performance is a feat of subtle bravura. It’s no easy thing to play a mother in one breath and her child in another. (Ask Norman Bates.) As in Strout’s novel, there is a possibility here that Lucy has fantasized her mother’s visit, whether in the haze of her sickness or in the more productive intentional imaginings of a fiction writer; whatever the case, as Lucy goes deeper into her story, the older woman starts to fade, and Linney lets us see through Lucy’s shyness to her open heart, which has sustained her through a life of loneliness and a staid and estranging marriage. Linney’s skin seems nearly to shine, and tears roll down her cheeks, which she wipes with practical, smiling self-assurance.

Penguin Random House Audio, a producer of the play, is releasing an audiobook of the production, and that, in fact, may be the better way to experience it, because, despite Linney’s sensitivity and finesse, something is missing onstage. There is a lulling quality to the play’s narrative form, which, in the cozy darkness, can feel like a bedtime story (I couldn’t help but notice some heads drooping), and there are too many of those Amgash anecdotes, with their parade of bit characters, which at first provide an opening into the drama of the Bartons but eventually distract us from it. The problem is partly structural: Eyre and Munro have leaned heavily on Lucy’s childhood, all but erasing the novel’s thread involving literary mentorship, and certain details, such as Lucy’s enduring preoccupation with the Nazis (her father, stationed in Germany, killed two local boys at point-blank range; her husband’s German father was a prisoner of war; and, with almost apologetic gratuitousness, Lucy notes that her angelic doctor is Jewish), fail to cohere. But there is a textural mundaneness, too. On Crowley’s restricted stage, the physical action consists mainly of Linney pacing from chair to bed and back again, and Strout’s canny elisions register too often as blanks. “All life amazes me,” Lucy says, and Linney’s face lights up beautifully as she says it. That is what this production could use: more life—an escape from the antiseptic cloister of the hospital room to the rousing world outside. ♦

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New York Times Bestseller

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON

by Elizabeth Strout ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2016

Fiction with the condensed power of poetry: Strout deepens her mastery with each new work, and her psychological acuity has...

From Pulitzer Prize– winning Strout ( The Burgess Boys , 2013, etc.), a short, stark novel about the ways we break and maintain the bonds of family.

The eponymous narrator looks back to the mid-1980s, when she goes into the hospital for an appendix removal and succumbs to a mysterious fever that keeps her there for nine weeks. The possible threat to her life brings Lucy’s mother, from whom she has been estranged for years, to her bedside—but not the father whose World War II–related trauma is largely responsible for clever Lucy’s fleeing her impoverished family for college and life as a writer. She marries a man from a comfortable background who can’t ever quite quiet her demons; his efforts to bridge the gap created by their wildly different upbringings occupy some of the novel’s saddest pages. As in Olive Kittredge (2008), Strout peels back layers of denial and self-protective brusqueness to reveal the love that Lucy’s mother feels but cannot express. In fewer than 200 intense, dense pages, she considers class prejudice, the shame that poverty brings, the AIDS epidemic, and the healing powers—and the limits—of art. Most of all, this is a story of mothers and daughters: Lucy’s ambivalent feelings for the mother who failed to protect her are matched by her own guilt for leaving the father of her two girls, who have never entirely forgiven her. Later sections, in which Lucy’s dying mother tells her “I need you to leave” and the father who brutalized her says, “What a good girl you’ve always been,” are almost unbearably moving, with their pained recognition that the mistakes we make are both irreparable and subject to repentance. The book does feel a bit abbreviated, but that’s only because the characters and ideas are so compelling we want to hear more from the author who has limned them so sensitively.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-4000-6769-5

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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PERSPECTIVES

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Jewell

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clock This article was published more than  8 years ago

Elizabeth Strout’s ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ review

“There was a time, and it was many years ago now,” Elizabeth Strout’s slim and spectacular new novel begins, “when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.” And it feels like she is going to tell us a story, the old-fashioned, uncomplicated kind. But only for a little while. “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. It starts with the clean, solid structure and narrative distance of a fairy tale yet becomes more intimate and improvisational, coming close at times to the rawness of autofiction by writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk. Strout is playing with form here, with ways to get at a story, yet nothing is tentative or haphazard. She is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.

Look back at the best books of 2015.

Three weeks into her hospital stay, Lucy Barton wakes to find her mother at the foot of her bed. She has not seen her in years. For the next five nights, her mother sits in a chair and, with a Scheherazade-like desperation, tells Lucy stories about people from Amgash, Ill., where she raised her family in poverty. Lucy has escaped the town and the poverty and lives with her husband and two kids in New York. The Chrysler Building framed by her hospital window gleams and beckons to her as powerfully as the green light on Daisy’s dock beckons to Gatsby. The city is just beyond the glass, but Lucy, because of an infection no one can identify, no longer has access to it.

To get to this hospital room, her mother has taken her first airplane flight and made her first trip to the city. “Was it scary getting a taxi, Mom?” Lucy asks. “I have a tongue in my head, and I used it,” her mother replies, the brusque and defensive tone clearly familiar to Lucy.

20 novels we can’t wait to read in 2016. And this list only gets us to June.

But when her mother begins telling stories, her voice becomes different: rushed, compressed, “as though a pressure of feeling and words and observations had been stuffed down inside her for years.” Lucy becomes enthralled with this new voice and yearns for more. At the same time, these stories bring back memories of Lucy’s childhood in that town, where they lived as social pariahs in her uncle’s garage with no heat and “only a trickle of cold water from a makeshift sink,” and often ate molasses on bread for dinner. They bring back the abuse Lucy suffered at the hands of her parents, and these scenes are rendered briefly and acutely, as close to giving the reader the shock of the experience as one can imagine.

Here in the hospital room, at least at first, Lucy feels safe. She feels affection. She dozes off listening to the rushed voice and thinks, “All I want is this.” Later, she corrects herself:

“It turned out I wanted something else. I wanted my mother to ask about my life. I wanted to tell her about the life I was living now. Stupidly — it was just stupidity — I blurted out, ‘Mom, I got two stories published.’ She looked at me quickly and quizzically, as if I had said I had grown extra toes, then she looked out the window and said nothing. ‘Just dumb ones,’ I said, ‘in tiny magazines.’ Still she said nothing.”

The hospital has infantilized Lucy so that she can access her child self more easily, and she’s happy just to listen to her mother’s voice. But the adult wants to be known, seen, heard. Lucy’s mother is incapable of this. She is proud of her daughter but will not show it. She loves her daughter but will not say it, even when begged. She deliberately misinterprets Lucy’s motives, denies all memory of abuse and shuts down at the moments Lucy needs her the most.

Much like her mother’s new voice that compels her so, Lucy’s narration takes on the same compression, the same urgency. She is often trying to reclarify what she has said, as if the reader, like her mother, is on the verge of misunderstanding. Her attempt to tell this story is as much a struggle for her as the difficult events she is relating, as if a thick membrane separates her from all others, as if this novel is her desperate attempt to push through.

And it is. We learn that these pages we are reading are the pages of her first novel, which she began after attending a talk by a writer named Sarah Payne. If her mother was the center of gravity of Lucy’s childhood, Sarah Payne is the gravitational pull of her adulthood. Sarah’s words of advice to Lucy during a writing workshop in Arizona help us understand how to read this book:

"This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter," Sarah says about the writing Lucy has shown her. "Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You are not doing it right." Later, Sarah tells the class: "You will have only one story. You'll write your one story many ways. Don't ever worry about story. You have only one."

You might be tempted to think that this alienated and alienating middle-aged woman is Strout’s one story — she did turn a similar character into a household name with her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Olive Kitteridge.” But “My Name Is Lucy Barton” is the story of a daughter who loved her mother, and that is a very different story. It is also the work of a more mature writer, scaling new heights.

Sarah tells Lucy and her other students to go to the page “with a heart as open as the heart of God.” And this is precisely what Strout has done.

Lily King is the author of four novels, most recently "Euphoria."

Reviews of Elizabeth Strout's previous novels :

“Olive Kitteridge”

“The Burgess Boys”

“Abide With Me”

My Name is Lucy Barton

By Elizabeth Strout

Random House. 193 pp. $26

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My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth strout.

193 pages, Hardcover

First published January 12, 2016

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“It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”

This is a story about a woman who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly.

...I think 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.”

It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it's the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.

As she recovers from surgery complications, a shocked Lucy receives a five day visit from her estranged mother who can only express her feelings by telling stories of old acquaintances and their imperfect lives; and while listening, Lucy Barton revisits her own memories of terror, isolation and the "thing" she does not want to remember in order to make peace with herself and her family.

Interesting and touching read narrated in the form of multiple short stories as with Olive Kitteridge .

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My Name Is Lucy Barton review – unspoken truths and new beginnings

The relationship between mother and daughter, in all its thorniness and intricacy, is at the heart of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel.

In the 1980s, Lucy, an aspiring writer, ends up spending nine weeks in hospital when she develops complications following what was supposed to be a routine operation. During this time, she is visited by the mother she hasn’t seen for many years and this short visit – five days out of both their lives – becomes the episode around which the rest of the story hangs.

My Name Is Lucy Barton encompasses Lucy’s marriage and her path to becoming a writer, but it is in the intimacy of these five days, with Lucy’s mother taking catnaps in the chair beside her bed, that we come to understand the nature of the bond between them.

It is also a story of beginnings and the way people are shaped by their backgrounds. Lucy’s childhood was one of considerable poverty. She grew up on the fringes of a small town in Illinois and spent some years living in the garage of a great uncle. These experiences – half remembered, rarely discussed, always there – Lucy carries with her into marriage and life in New York. Much in this goes go unsaid, including the words “I love you”. Lucy has come to accept this.

Nor do Lucy and her mother discuss her father’s temper or the reason for her own deep terror of snakes. It is a story full of silences just as families are full of silences. But it is about the incredible richness of meaning that can be contained in one small phrase: “I’m glad you’re here.”

The Pulitzer-winning author of Olive Kitteridge is a writer of considerable emotional insight. Her style is simple but at times profound and, in its own delicate way, it is often deeply moving. There is little sentimentality in the way Strout captures the deep need that exists between Lucy and her mother as well as their ability to hurt one another.

It is a novel, too, about the connections that form between people over time – between Lucy and the doctor who is kind to her and the writing teacher who inspires her. This is also, in many ways, a novel about the ways in which a writer becomes a writer; it is a book of great tenderness and truth.

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My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout review: a light that never goes out

This is a magnificent book, one that explores much hurt and darkness without ever relinquishing its compassion or its light, says danielle mclaughlin.

Elizabeth Strout: navigates these mother-daughter conversations in prose that is finely tuned and unerring, harnessing the power of the unsaid as well as the said. Photograph: Getty Images

Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel opens with an image of the Chrysler Building whose “geometric brilliance of lights” was visible from the narrator’s bed during a hospital stay in the mid-1980s.

The hospital stay lasted nine weeks, but the novel is structured around the five days when the narrator’s mother came to visit, sleeping each night in a chair at the foot of her daughter’s bed. Lucy hadn’t seen her mother for years before the day she turned up at the hospital “where the Chrysler Building shone outside the window”.

The Chrysler Building appears at different points in the book, always in luminous terms: shining, a “constellation”, a “beacon” of “the largest and best hopes for mankind and its aspirations and desire for beauty”. In this powerful and exquisite novel, Strout never loses sight of light or beauty, even as she explores the complex territory of a family whose traumas have become layered and compacted.

Among Strout's previously published books are Olive Kitteridge , which won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Premio Bancarella Prize, and Amy and Isabelle , which won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

My Name is Lucy Barton is longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. It is told in language that is clear, honest and direct. Several times the narrator, Lucy, makes reference to the act of "recording", rather than "writing" or "telling", and there is a sense of quiet urgency, a concentration on the accuracy of her recollections.

Strout’s prose is assured and precise as she details the narrator’s struggles with memory: her own and other people’s. Poignantly, Lucy says: “I have no memory of my mother ever kissing me. She may have kissed me though; I may be wrong.”

And on recalling her mother’s pronouncement on the ending of a neighbour’s marriage, she says: “But maybe that wasn’t what my mother said.” There is no attempt at point-scoring against her mother, only a desire to provide true and exact testimony.

The narrator describes growing up in Amgash, Illinois, a tiny rural town where, as well as being poor, the family were considered “oddities”. Until she was 11, they lived in a garage next door to a great-uncle’s house, moving into the house when he died. They had “hot water and a flush toilet” then, but it was still cold.

The house was isolated, down a dirt road amid corn and soybean fields. There was also isolation of a psychological kind: no books, newspapers or television and, at school, the narrator and her siblings were told that their family stank.

There was abuse and hardship. At the heart of the novel is the mother-daughter relationship, which Strout explores in a way that is unsentimental and unsparing and, at the same time, hugely compassionate. Here is a mother who struck her children without warning, “impulsively and vigorously”, who, when her daughter’s breasts began to develop, told her that she looked like one of the neighbour’s cows.

She is also a woman with a curious take on offering comfort; during her hospital visit she shares stories of sad and failed marriages, of ruined lives, going on to advise that her daughter, too, will have marriage trouble. But Sarah Payne, the writer whose workshop Lucy attends, declares emphatically that “this is a story about love”.

Lucy’s attempts to extract from her mother an admission of love are heartrending, as is her mother’s seeming inability to provide it, in any direct fashion at least. But, against all odds, their exchanges are, in their own way, often uplifting. Strout navigates these mother-daughter conversations in prose that is finely tuned and unerring, harnessing the power of the unsaid as well as the said. She never lets the light go out.

The novel’s main focus is the relationship between Lucy and her mother, but the reader also witnesses something of the complex relationship she has with her siblings. “We were equally friendless and equally scorned,” she says of herself and her sister Vicky, “and we eyed each other with the same suspicion with which we eyed the rest of the world.”

With regard to her brother and sister, Lucy appears to suffer something akin to survivor’s guilt; she questions what she terms her own “ruthlessness”.

“How Vicky managed, to this day I don’t know,” she says, and she sends Vicki money for things the children need or want. “I think she feels she is owed the money by me,” she says, “and I think she may be right.”

And while the narrator tells us that “this is not the story of my marriage”, there are also insights into the dynamics of her relationship with her husband, William, and her daughters Chrissie and Becka.

Strout has said, “It is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ that interests me as a writer, but the murkiness of human experience and the consistent imperfections of our lives.”

When Lucy writes to her mother after hospital, she replies on a card showing the Chrysler Building at night. “Maybe it was the darkness with only the pale crack of light that came through the door,” Lucy says earlier in the novel, “the constellation of the magnificent Chrysler Building right beyond us, that allowed us to speak in ways we never had.”

This is a magnificent book, one that explores much hurt and darkness without ever relinquishing its compassion or its light. Danielle McLaughlin is the author of Dinosaurs on Other Planets

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Reviews of My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Amgash Series #1

by Elizabeth Strout

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• Literary Fiction
• Midwest, USA
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
• Contemporary
• Generational Sagas
• Mid-Life Onwards
• Strong Women

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About this Book

• Reading Guide

Book Summary

The profound mother-daughter bond is explored through a mother's hospital visit to her estranged daughter by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys .

A new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is cause for celebration. Her bestselling novels, including Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys,  have illuminated our most tender relationships. Now, in My Name Is Lucy Barton, this extraordinary writer shows how a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all - the one between mother and daughter. 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.

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. ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Lucy's husband asks her mother to visit her in the hospital and pays for her trip. Do you think this is a gesture of love on his part?
• What role does the gossip Lucy and her mother share play in the book? 
• Do you think Lucy blames her mother for the more painful parts of her childhood? Could her mother have done better?
• World War II and the Nazis profoundly affect Lucy's father (and hence her whole family), Lucy's marriage to her first husband, and even her dreams. Discuss.
• Lucy expresses great love for her doctor. How would you describe that love?
• Lucy's friend Jeremy tells her she needs to be ruthless to be a writer. Does she take his advice? How?
• Why does Lucy keep returning again and again to see the marble ...
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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Strout's genius is to pack so much rich emotion into such a short work, and to do so with simple, uncomplicated language – something that, in my opinion, few authors are able to achieve. It is very possible, of course, that her expertise in writing short stories contributes heavily to this (as demonstrated by her Pulitzer Prize winning collection Olive Kittredge )... continued

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(Reviewed by Davida Chazan ).

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Beyond the Book

What defines a novel.

Many of the reviews of Strout's latest novel, My Name is Lucy Barton , have called it a "slim volume." Some might even say that its length of just over 200 pages makes it a novella not a novel. This raises the question, what page/word count defines a novel? Opinions on this differ widely. For example, Writer's Digest suggests to writers who want to submit manuscripts in the adult fiction, commercial and literary genres, that a book with fewer than 70,000 words might be too short, and recommends that authors should aim for between 80,000 and 100,000 words. Assuming an average of 250-300 words per page an 80,000 word novel would have about 290 pages and a 100,000 word novel would stretch across about 360 pages. An article in the ...

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Review: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

BY Lucy Scholes

1st Jan 2015 Book Reviews

Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout is regarded as one of America’s finest writers. Her latest novel is a powerful study of an emotionally charged mother/daughter relationship.

Buy My Name is Lucy Barton at Amazon

Recovering from complications  after having her appendix removed, 30–something Lucy Barton is visited by her near-estranged mother.

Lucy is confined to her Manhattan hospital bed for nine long weeks, but it’s this brief five-day stretch that provides the focal point around which the larger narrative of her life is tightly coiled. Jumping both forward and backward in time, we come to understand that Lucy lives a life defined by acute isolation and loneliness .

Until she’s eleven, she and her family lived in a garage in the rural Illinois town of Amgash. There was no central heating, no bathroom, just a “trickle of cold water from a makeshift sink,” and all of them—mother, father, brother, sister and Lucy—together in the one room, with no escape from their father.

His abuse of his children, which is the result of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder he’s suffering after serving in the Second World War, hangs like a heavy shadow over the text.

It’s hinted at in various absences and ellipses, both in the larger narrative of Lucy's life and the bedside conversations between mother and daughter, but it is never fully articulated or acknowledged.

“The result is an extraordinary achievement: clear and concise, but inordinately moving.”

A kind-hearted school janitor lets Lucy stay after classes, providing her with a warm room where she can lose herself in homework and novels before she has to return home, but otherwise she is “friendless and scorned.” 

We see the lasting effects of this early experience as the novel progresses. “Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life,” she explains, “and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.” 

Lucy Barton moves to New York, gets married and has her own children. She fulfills her lifelong ambition of becoming a writer, and a successful one at that; one who actually makes money. But despite all outward signs that suggest otherwise, she’s haunted by loneliness.

Raised with so little, with “only the inside of my head to call my own,” her outlook on life is different to that of nearly everyone around her. The only people with whom she feels any real affinity are two characters marked by their own fragility: the kind, fatherly doctor who sees her twice a day but only charges her for five visits, and a writer who encourages Lucy in her work.

“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.” 

In many ways the novel can be read as a companion piece to Strout’s earlier work, the Pulitzer prize-winning Olive Kitteridge . Olive is a cantankerous teacher in a small Maine town, stood somewhat apart from the larger community around her.

Here she hones in on Lucy’s inner experience, depicting first-hand what it’s like to live a life of not belonging. The result is an extraordinary achievement: clear and concise, but inordinately moving.

Read our review of Olive Kitteridge , also by Elizabeth Strout

Read our pick of the best new books released in February

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My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, book review

Strout avoids sentimentality by imbuing lucy's narrative with a pervasive sense of uncertainty, article bookmarked.

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In this slight, spare and tender novel, the eponymous central character of Lucy Barton tells the story of a time when, for "almost nine weeks" in the mid-1980s, she was hospitalised following complications arising from the removal of her appendix. In the course of her stay, she is visited by her mother, from whom she had been estranged for years,which offers each of them an opportunity to explore the nature of their relationship.

Lucy, a writer living in New York, is making these reflections in the later years of her life. The memories of her weeks in hospital set her thinking about the years she spent growing up in Illinois; about the loves and friendships that have touched her life; and about the pain of her marriage break-up. It is a tale of sadness and remembering, but of moments of piercing joy too.

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Most of these moments arise from Lucy's recollections of the brief period of distant intimacy she shared with her mother during her weeks of poor health. "I remember wanting my mother to ask me about my life", says Lucy. And Lucy's mother – who cannot "say the words I love you" – never does. Instead, she shares with her daughter several weeks of apparently pointless conversation. And from the silences that surround their exchanges, we see the pair develop for one another fresh feelings of sympathy and love.

There is a risk that these kinds of awakenings can feel mawkish. But Strout is able to avoid sentimentality by imbuing Lucy's narrative with a pervasive sense of uncertainty (she routinely confesses that her memories might be the product of wish-thinking). For most of the novel she speaks in a manner that is flat, hesitant, muted, deliberate. This means that her bursts of peculiar lyricism carry extra force and weight.

At times, the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist's prose can be so lacking in adornment as to be tedious but, quietly elegiac, this is the story of a single life that also manages to tell the story of many.

Viking, £12.99. Order at t£10.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop

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My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel Paperback – October 11, 2016

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Book 1 of 4 Amgash
• Print length 240 pages
• Language English
• Publication date October 11, 2016
• Dimensions 5.2 x 0.64 x 7.98 inches
• ISBN-10 0812979524
• ISBN-13 978-0812979527
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (October 11, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812979524
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812979527
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.64 x 7.98 inches
• #1,059 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #1,536 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
• #3,211 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Elizabeth strout.

Elizabeth Strout is the author of the New York Times bestseller Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the national bestseller Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine and New York City.

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It’s a happy coincidence that we recommend Becca Rothfeld’s essay collection “All Things Are Too Small” — a critic’s manifesto “in praise of excess,” as her subtitle has it — in the same week that we also recommend Justin Taylor’s maximalist new novel “Reboot,” an exuberant satire of modern society that stuffs everything from fandom to TV retreads to the rise of conspiracy culture into its craw. I don’t know if Rothfeld has read Taylor’s novel, but I get the feeling she would approve. Maybe you will too: In the spirit of “more, bigger, louder,” why not pick those up together?

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