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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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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2016

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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SEEN & HEARD

PERSPECTIVES

THE GREAT ALONE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018

A tour de force.

In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.

After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s ( The Nightingale , 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

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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My Name is Lucy Barton , by Elizabeth Strout (Random House) . Much of this beautifully unsentimental novel takes place over five days in a New York hospital, where Lucy Barton, the narrator, is recovering from surgery. Her estranged mother is also there, filling the room with endless unspoken memories about Lucy’s deeply poor, troubled childhood. Strout, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Olive Kitteridge,” writes of a powerful, imperfect familial love. “Lucy comes from nothing,” one character says. But Lucy knows that no one comes from nothing: we’re haunted by our past every day. “This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world,” Lucy reflects. “Half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.”

All the Houses , by Karen Olsson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) . Helen, the protagonist of this novel, is of the woman-child type—resisting adult life. When her father has a heart attack, she returns to her childhood home, in Washington, D.C. She immerses herself in study of the Iran-Contra affair—the scandal that brought down her father, a high-level bureaucrat—and in memories of her teen-age years, writing vignettes of both as she reconsiders her family’s identity. Olsson’s depiction of upper-crust Beltway life is vivid. The novel’s historical and personal strands don’t always intellectually cohere, but their juxtaposition often has visceral force. Of a snowstorm at the height of the scandal, Helen recalls, “White out: the city was redacted.”

Ted Hughes , by Jonathan Bate (Harper) . Hughes, the husband of Sylvia Plath, was among the most prolific and important English poets of the twentieth century. This vigorous biography draws on unpublished letters, journals, and manuscripts, but Hughes’s estate revoked permission to quote materials unrestrictedly, so the narrative, while grounded in source material, reads somewhat anecdotally. Bate deftly weaves together scenes of Hughes’s rural Yorkshire boyhood and student days at Cambridge; his first encounter with Plath and their tumultuous life together; and his later appointment as British Poet Laureate. Bate, a professor of literature, gives sustained attention to Hughes’s poems, substantiating the poet’s own view that “as an imaginative writer, my only capital is my own life.”

This Divided Island , by Samanth Subramanian (Thomas Dunne) . While living in Sri Lanka, where nearly three decades of civil war came to a bloody end in 2009, the author collected stories from those who experienced it. He provides a history of the schism between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils on the island and probes the question of how members of each group managed to justify to themselves violence against the other. Subramanian writes evocatively, conveying the curdled mood of a country where the victorious state’s heavy-handed attempt to enforce a veneer of normalcy is challenged by the catalogue of losses remembered and recounted in many “fantastic or tragic or melancholic or even happy stories.”

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By James Wood

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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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 review – Laura Linney triumphs as a writer confronting her past

Bridge theatre, London Elizabeth Strout’s novel works outstandingly on stage, thanks to sole performer Linney’s nuanced command of the narrative

N ovels, depending on the stream of time, rarely make good plays. Elizabeth Strout’s first-person narrative , longlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2016, however, breaks the rules and fits perfectly on the stage. That’s partly because of the quality of the writing and partly because of a beautifully nuanced solo performance by Laura Linney : a space that recently looked underpopulated with a four-character play, suddenly feels colonised by Linney’s commanding presence. Fans of the book will know that it is the reminiscence of a writer hospitalised for nine weeks in New York by a mysterious illness. But the focus is on five days when the eponymous heroine renews acquaintance with her mother, who has come to visit her from rural Illinois and from whom she has been long estranged. The two women talk, gossip about people from Lucy’s past, warily seek each other’s love. In the end, the mother departs as abruptly as she came and you feel the two women have briefly bonded without ever addressing their shared guilt: in the mother’s case, over Lucy’s impoverished childhood and, in Lucy’s, over her own necessary desertion.

It sounds slight: in fact, it’s a story full of mysterious resonances. What comes out in performance, even more than in reading the book, is the idea that, even if you totally reinvent yourself, your past remains inescapable. Lucy has sought to overcome a childhood in which she and her siblings were beaten and deprived of the consolations of TV, films and magazines. Her father, who fought in the second world war, suffered from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Fleeing Illinois, Lucy has settled in New York, married, had children and acquired the ruthlessness that is part of a successful writer’s equipment. Yet, as Lucy admits, the Barton family provided a structure she was unaware of, until it was ended by death.

Although I was sorry not to hear more of Lucy’s literary mentor, Sarah Payne, Rona Munro’s adaptation is sensitive to Strout’s structure. Richard Eyre’s production also has a distilled clarity: Bob Crowley’s set consists of a hospital bed and chair, while Luke Halls’s video design modulates between vistas of the gleamingly geometric Chrysler building and Illinois acres of soybeans and corn, which seem to stretch to infinity.

But it is Linney who triumphantly carries the evening. I’d seen her once before on stage, in Eyre’s Broadway production of The Crucible, where she caught perfectly Elizabeth Proctor’s puritan severity. Here she switches easily between different modes. She talks to us, the audience, with warmth and ease. When she characterises Lucy’s mother, prattling on about the marital misfortunes of sundry relations, her voice acquires a rasping, midwestern edge. As Lucy relives her hospital memories, Linney is even more extraordinary: she shifts between exasperated fury at her mother’s wilful incuriosity and loving astonishment at this unworldly old woman’s ability to negotiate labyrinthine hospital corridors and the New York jungle. You can see the story in several ways but it is partly about the enforced loneliness of the writer who, at the same time, reinforces our common humanity. Linney, as a performer, has mastered the art of public solitude and gives you the uncanny feeling that you are listening not to an invented story but a slice of lived experience.

• Laura Linney
• Elizabeth Strout
• Bridge theatre

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BookBrowse Reviews My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

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My Name Is Lucy Barton

Amgash Series #1

by Elizabeth Strout

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A novel about an ordinary woman, told in an extraordinary way.

This is Lucy Barton's story. She will tell you that she came from nothing; she even told her mother once that her family was "trash." At the time, she was in a hospital bed for many weeks from complications after an appendectomy but, of course, this made her mother angry. Later, Lucy Barton learned something important about how judgmental this sounded, when she attended a creative writing workshop. There she learned "we never know, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully. It seems a simple thought, but as I get older I see more and more that she had to tell us that." Despite Lucy Barton's view on the matter, it seems to me that Elizabeth Strout's latest novel intends to reveal her protagonist to readers as fully as possible; and this enigmatic situation is what makes the novel so fascinating. To do this, a large part of this past tense, first-person narrated story focuses on Lucy's recollections surrounding the five days her mother stayed with her in the hospital. From this, we get glimpses into Lucy's past, both through her own eyes as well as through her mother's stories. Lucy also looks back on other parts of her life that happened many years after the hospital stay. Thus we get a complete outline of Lucy's life in a scant 200 pages. It is as if we're catching up with a good friend whom we know really well, but haven't been in touch with for a long time. Strout echoes the contrasting elements of knowing and not knowing someone throughout. For example, Lucy's mother seems cold and distant, and can never say, "I love you" to anyone. Yet she has a loving nickname for Lucy, and comes (uncharacteristically by plane) to sit at her daughter's bedside. Lucy often speaks of how much she loves her mother, but pointedly tells her this at very precise times, more in hopes of getting a reaction out of her, than simply wanting to express her feelings. What impressed me about this was how realistic the relationship feels. It is filled with the types of nuances and contradictions that we probably only see through hindsight or deep introspection. 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 ). It is extremely difficult to review a book that is this perfectly succinct, filled with such deftly composed and controlled sentiment, which belies all this by feeling charming and effortless. My Name Is Lucy Barton is so carefully constructed, and each layer revealed with such delicacy, reading it feels like being an archaeologist uncovering an extremely fragile artifact.

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My Name is Lucy Barton

35 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-18

Chapters 19-37

Chapters 38-55

Character Analysis

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Summary and Study Guide

Elizabeth Strout’s New York Times bestselling novel My Name is Lucy Barton follows the titular character on a journey of healing. Published in 2016, My Name is Lucy Barton explores the impact of trauma as Lucy navigates her reunion with her estranged mother. Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, My Name is Lucy Barton was adapted for the stage as a one-woman show featuring acclaimed actress Laura Linney in 2018 and 2020. Strout’s novel employs a series of episodic vignettes that offer a nuanced exploration of what it means to truly heal.

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 Lucy Barton , a writer and mother, recovers from complications from her appendix surgery in a 1980s New York City hospital with a view of the Chrysler Building . Isolated from her daughters and husband William, Lucy reunites with her estranged mother, who flies in from rural Amgash, Illinois, to care for Lucy. William has called Lucy’s mother and asked her to help. Lucy and her mother struggle to reconnect as they avoid discussing the abuse and trauma Lucy experienced as a child. Lucy’s mother attempts to entertain Lucy with gossip from their hometown.

Lucy recalls the harsh poverty that isolated her family and the abuse she and her siblings faced because of their father’s untreated post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in World War II. Lucy’s mother tells her the story of Kathie Nicely, a wealthy friend who left her husband and children for another man only to be abandoned by her lover. Lucy empathizes with Kathie.

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In Chapter 4, Lucy remembers how she would escape the brutal cold of her family’s one-room garage home by staying longer at school and reading. She aspires to be a writer from a young age and, eventually, earns a full scholarship to a college outside of Chicago. In college, Lucy meets William, the son of a German man. Lucy and William travel to Amgash to introduce William to her family and announce their plans to marry and move to New York City. Lucy’s father rejects William because of his German lineage. Lucy later learns her father killed two innocent German boys during the war and is consumed by his guilt.

Estranged from her family, Lucy moves to New York City to begin a new life with William. They have two daughters named Chrissie and Becka. Lucy publishes two stories in small literary magazines. Lucy forms a deep friendship with a neighbor named Jeremy, a psychoanalyst who encourages Lucy to call herself an artist and advises her to be ruthless. In a local store, Lucy meets an accomplished writer named Sarah Payne , whose books Lucy has read. Sarah’s writing about rural New Hampshire resonates with Lucy.

Chapter 8 returns to Lucy’s recovery in her hospital room. Lucy and her mother continue to struggle to communicate. Lucy seeks validation from her mother and shares the news about her publications. When her mother does not respond, Lucy finds comfort in her kind doctor. In Chapter 9, Lucy details how her father would lock her in his truck for entire days while her parents worked. The sound of children crying triggers Lucy’s traumatic memories. Lucy’s mother later apologizes for how poor they were. She shares her concerns for Lucy’s brother, who lives at home and reads books for adolescents, and Lucy’s sister, who is always angry.

Lucy continues to receive more tests at the hospital. She and her mother read a gossip magazine together. Lucy begins to grow more resentful of her mother’s inability to acknowledge the abuse in their household.

In Chapter 20, Lucy flashes back to a panel she attends where Sarah Payne speaks about fiction. Sarah’s words inspire Lucy to begin writing her story, which she includes in the novel. Back at the hospital, Lucy tries to hide her distress because of her mother’s aversion to crying. Her kind doctor comforts her and wipes away a tear.

In another flashback, Lucy attends a writing workshop taught by Sarah in Arizona. Lucy shows Sarah pieces of her novel. Sarah encourages Lucy to keep writing. At the hospital, Lucy remains unnerved by her mother’s inability to confront the truth. Lucy evokes a memory of her father publicly parading her brother around town in women’s clothing as punishment for cross-dressing. In the hospital scenes, Lucy’s mother shares stories about a wealthy woman from their town whose husband has an affair and causes her to have a heart attack. This story distresses Lucy.

On her mother’s last day, Lucy asks her mother if she loves her. Overwhelmed, her mother refuses to answer. Later that day, the doctor informs Lucy that she may need surgery. Unable to cope, Lucy’s mother abruptly abandons Lucy and leaves to return to Amgash. Devastated, Lucy waits in a hallway to be taken for testing. She locks eyes with a patient dying from AIDS and feels comforted.

Lucy does not need additional surgery and stays in the hospital for nine weeks. After writing a letter thanking her mother for coming to see her, Lucy receives a card from her mother with the Chrysler building on it. Upon returning home, Lucy learns that her beloved neighbor Jeremy has died of AIDS. She wonders if the man she saw in the hospital could have been Jeremy.

In the years that follow, Lucy continues to see her doctor for check-ups until he retires. In Chapter 39, Lucy unveils that, during her childhood, her father would masturbate compulsively in front of her. Nine years after her mother’s visit to New York, Lucy travels to Illinois to visit her mother on her death bed. Lucy sees her father for the first time in many years and no longer feels any anger or resentment. Shortly after her arrival, Lucy’s mother asks her to leave forever. Lucy acquiesces but declares her love for her mother before leaving. Lucy returns a year later to say goodbye to her father, who dies from pneumonia.

Lucy struggles after her parents’ deaths but soon finds success with her first published book. When her daughters leave for college, Lucy decides to divorce her husband and resists any financial support from William. Lucy remarries a professional cellist with a similar upbringing. Lucy reflects on her growth. She believes she has followed Jeremy’s advice and been ruthless.

After her divorce, Lucy struggles to connect with her daughters, who are hurt by her decision to leave. Lucy and her daughter Becka watch the events of 9/11 happen on the television screen. Becka calls for her, and Lucy comforts her. Lucy reflects on how much she has grown and feels at peace. She ends the novel by remembering the beautiful sunsets in Amgash.

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Elizabeth Strout’s Follow-Up to ‘Lucy Barton’ Is a Master Class on Class

By Andrea Barrett

• May 12, 2017
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ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE By Elizabeth Strout 254 pp. Random House. $27.

“Anything Is Possible” might look like a sequel, since it takes place after the action of Elizabeth Strout’s best-selling 2016 novel, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” and portrays many of the same characters. But it’s actually something far more complex, reaching across space (think of Faulkner’s work, or Louise Erdrich’s) and through layers of memory. Where the earlier book turned on the crystalline austerity and reserve of its narrative voice, guided by Strout’s unerring sense of what Lucy would omit, the new work almost literally undoes the older one. What Lucy omitted, we learn — what Lucy hid? — radically alters our understanding of what Lucy said.

On its own, this volume of nine linked stories offers pleasures akin to those of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” to which it pays clear homage, and to Strout’s own collection of linked stories, “Olive Kitteridge” — but you’d be missing a lot to read it that way. In the novel Lucy narrates, she takes center stage and describes writing a book successful enough to land her a television appearance and a book tour. Here, seldom physically present but considered through the viewpoints of her siblings and former neighbors, she’s the emblematic writer whose work reflects their own lives back to them. You need both to appreciate Strout’s most striking effect, a stereoscopic view that makes Lucy’s rural hometown, Amgash, Ill., seem unusually vivid and Lucy herself truly three-dimensional.

Our familiarity with these stories’ central characters — Lucy’s brother, Pete, and sister, Vicky; the janitor who let Lucy study after school in heated classrooms; the sisters known as “the Pretty Nicely Girls”; Abel Blaine, who taught Lucy to search in the Dumpster behind the bakery for food; and more, all known to us from “Lucy Barton” — enhances the illusion. In the novel, Lucy and her mother gossiped about those characters, swapping stories about their lives as tokens for the feelings they were too reserved to state directly. Here, in their own stories, the “tokens” reveal their complex pains and desires and then, appearing as minor characters in other stories, subside once more into the background. Object, subject, object again.

Tommy Guptill, the janitor in “The Sign,” sees Marilyn Macauley in a store just before he passes a display of Lucy Barton’s new book and then thinks of Marilyn’s husband, Charlie, damaged by his military service like Tommy’s own brother. Charlie reappears in “Windmills” as the person Patty Nicely loves and later gets his own very moving story, “The Hit-Thumb Theory.” And so on. A web of allusions, partial memories and teasingly Cubist fragments weaves through the stories and into the earlier novel, fortified by recurring images and memories. Look! Here’s the homely “Sewing and Alterations” sign at the end of the driveway at Lucy’s family home. There’s the single tree in the endless fields of corn and soybeans, the truck in which Lucy was locked as a little girl, the series of children’s books still cherished by Lucy’s brother. And, crucially, there’s a question raised earlier by Lucy: “We think, always we think, ‘What is it about someone that makes us despise that person, that makes us feel superior?’ ”

Many of Strout’s crisply drawn characters will confront that question as they move beyond their “humble beginnings.” Patty Nicely, in a moment of anger, calls Lucy’s niece “a piece of filth” and in a phone call refers to the Barton family as “trash.” Later she takes that back, feeling that her life has been changed by reading Lucy’s book, in which “Lucy wrote how people were always looking to feel superior to someone else, and Patty thought this was true.” Dottie Blaine similarly notes how certain visitors to her bed-and-breakfast “seemed to feel very superior” and that “this matter of different cultures was a fact that got lost in the country these days. And culture included class, which of course nobody ever talked about in this country, because it wasn’t polite, but Dottie also thought people didn’t talk about class because they didn’t really understand what it was. For example, had people known that Dottie and her brother had eaten from Dumpsters when they were children, what would they make of it?”

Dottie’s right. We don’t talk much about such matters (or we didn’t until recently). Strout is quietly offering us a kind of master class on class, starting with a title that ironically suggests its opposite. When, in “Sister,” Vicky reveals to Lucy some particularly humiliating family history and suggests that Lucy write about it, Pete says he’d prefer to read “about the family on the prairie” and Lucy begs her to stop talking. “She said — and her voice was loud and wobbly — ‘It was not that bad.’ Her voice rose. ‘No, I mean it.’”

But it was that bad. It was always that bad. Strout’s brilliant achievement is to create in one book a character who can give a clear but deeply reserved account of what it’s like to be isolated, poor and abused, even as she makes us see the dignity in refusing to dwell on the details. And then, in “Anything Is Possible,” Strout creates a messier, more richly human version of that character’s world, thick with details and even more profound in its rendering of the ways we save, or fail to save, one another.

Andrea Barrett is the author of six novels and three collections of short stories, including “Ship Fever,” which won the National Book Award, and, most recently, “Archangel.”

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