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Elizabeth Strout

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My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Elizabeth Strout (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

3.8 35,629 ratings

Book 1 of 4: Amgash

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

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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

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

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

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

About the Author

Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Olive, Again, an Oprah’s Book Club pick; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name is Lucy Barton, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Burgess Boys, named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and NPR; Abide with Me, a national bestseller; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Orange Prize. 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.

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.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B011G3HG5G
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; Reprint edition (January 12, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 12, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4651 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 181 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #57,794 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #396 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #500 in Women's Literary Fiction
- #731 in Mothers & Children Fiction

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Elizabeth Strout

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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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Eric Selby

Elizabeth Strout: A Writer's Writer

Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2016

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Elizabeth Strout: A Writer’s Writer
Eric Selby
Olive Kitteridge deserved the Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 2009. And were I on that committee for this year, my vote would be cast for My Name Is Lucy Barton (even though I don’t think the title is a good one for what this amazing novel offers the reader).
These two Elizabeth Strout novels are both very much alike thematically but oh-so-very different, revealing just how skilled Strout is with her craft.
I chuckled when, on a recent “Fresh Air” (NPR) interview with Terry Gross, the author said of Olive when asked about how she developed the character: “I just let her rip!” Indeed Olive does exactly that.
But Lucy, highly traumatized from her childhood (as is everyone in that household, or so we are led to believe as we move through the novel), is so unlike Olive. Lucy is sweet, caring, a woman who sees the good in others. (Olive does occasionally as well.)
Olive Kitteridge, written in third person and in a series of inter-related stories that emerge as a novel, is so unlike the first-person Lucy fictional memoir because that is what this novel is: written as a memoir. Lucy herself is a novelist—and published—and has taken a writing workshop with another well respected writer of fiction, Sarah Payne. (But should you decide to look for the books each has published, you’ll find nothing! Will Elizabeth Strout now assume those two identities and write—and publish in their names—their works?)
The novel is just under 200 pages and in short chapters. Lucy Barton (her original name and we never do learn what her husband’s last name is—at least I don’t recall that we do) is a wife and mother of two daughters. Lucy, in the mid-80s and as the AIDS epidemic was emerging into public awareness, has been hospitalized for an appendectomy. But complications emerge, resulting in her being in that New York City hospital for several weeks. She can see the Chrysler Building from her bed. Her husband comes only twice to see her. And when he brings their daughters, Lucy can see that the woman who is caring for them isn’t doing a good job. But Lucy says nothing. (This woman will emerge at the end of the novel in a surprising role.)
Lucy Barton loves her Big Apple life, an escape from the small Illinois town where she spent a terrible childhood, sometimes locked in her father’s truck when he and her mother were at work. One time a snake spent the day in the cab with her—and this is one of the traumas she has never conquered. Her brother slept occasionally with the pigs and wore, occasionally, women’s clothing. And then there was this issue: “What as a child I had called—to myself—the Thing, meaning an incident of my father becoming very anxious and not in control of himself.” The reader will not discover for certain what the Thing is until near the end when it becomes the central image representing what occurs in this novel. This is a family that cannot confront the abuse, the total dysfunction that has such deep roots, hence why I say the novel has a similar theme to the one the runs through Olive Kitteridge where so many characters are depressed and often suicidal.
For Lucy it was the discovery of books in third grade that saved her and then propelled her into her life as an author. (Based on the interview with Terry Gross, I realize that Elizabeth Strout had a wonderful childhood, living in the home of parents who were college professors at the University of New Hampshire. She spoke so lovingly of both parents.)
Lucy has not only not seenhermother since she left that little Illinois town but hasn’t heard from her either. Her mother has never seen her two New York City grandchildren, has never met their father. But suddenly she walks into Lucy’s hospital room. And there she stays for five days. Most of the novel involves what they talk about—and what they avoid talking about—during those days. But she doesn’t ever meet the granddaughters or son-in-law while in New York. The story emerges in oblique language. But not so oblique that the reader is left confused. That is the skill Lucy Barton has as a writer which, of course, means the skill the author herself has in writing this fictional memoir.
Fragile and oh-so-very-sweet, Lucy is, in her words, “so happy. Oh, I was happy speaking with my mother this way.”
Lucy has the ideal doctor—and she sort of falls in love with him. She has wonderful nurses for whom she and her mother select names representing their feelings toward the care takers.
This is also a novel about what makes a good novelist, with this advice from Sarah Payne: “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write [about them], remember this: You’re not doing it right.”
That’s definitely the voice of the author of My Name Is Lucy Barton. As those of us who have read Olive know, Elizabeth Strout does not protect her protagonist. And she certainly doesn’t protect Lucy either.
And finally this from the chapter on pages 96-99 which I think is priceless, Elizabeth Strout’s opportunity through Sarah Payne to rebuke readers who write “reader reviews” in which they confuse the author’s views with the views of the characters created by the author, those types of reviews I ignore (I just didn’t like Olive Kitteridge as a person. I wish the author made her nicer. To which I want to write—and have occasionally—Then read Heidi!)

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Elizabeth

Elizabeth Strout has done it again!

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2017

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For the second time, Elizabeth Strout has taken my breath away. Her prose and stories have this way of nudging right into the achy spots of my soul and I end up going off to do deep soul searching for a couple of days once I have finished her book (I’ve only read two of her books, but she is two-for-two if she is keeping score).

The story opens with Lucy recovering in a hospital bed from complications after a simple operation and is told from her voice through a series of conversations with her mother that provoke memories and introspection about Lucy’s childhood. She has been away from home for a long time, and her mother’s presence at her bedside ignites gentle conversation about their family’s past. Lucy has a deep ache to share things about her life with her mother, such as her desire to be a writer, issues in her marriage, and the joy of raising her two young daughters. But she also wants some answers.

Strout has a way of weaving beautiful stories around circumstances that many of us find uncomfortable. We see the characters truly struggle with issues that make them so, so very human. I read her 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge years ago and recall one of the main themes being about suicide and the deeply complex emotions that surround it. I loved it, but had to read something light and fluffy afterwards to give myself a break.

Lucy Barton’s struggle is about poverty and how society sometimes holds it against people even though they (specifically children) may not have a choice in their circumstances. She spoke about poverty in a way that was new to me in literary journey, speaking about how society perceives her as less than the rest of humanity and the inability to separate herself from the stigma of it even after she has physically removed herself from the situation, rather than the poverty as an issue itself. Here is an example where she was talking to her college lover and felt the need to hide her past, but he still manages to strike the nerve:

“Still, I loved him. He asked what we ate when I was growing up. I did not say, ‘Mostly molasses on bread.’ I did say, ‘We had baked beans a lot.’ And he said, ‘What did you do after that, all hang around and fart?’ Then I understood that I would never marry him. Its funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one’s past or one’s clothes, but then – a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh. “

It seems to me that her parents were perfectly comfortable with their poverty status and Lucy has trouble resolving this against her own conflicting ideals and perceptions of her parents’ responsibility in their situation. The story has the subtle undercurrent of her spirit saying to her mother “This is not ok! How could you let us be those kids that showed up to school smelly and in dirty clothes? How could you not notice?” At times, when Lucy is finally holding her mother accountable, her mother would wave it away and change the subject. This was the most heartbreaking part for me… It is tragic when the grown child finally looks at the parent and asks “Why?” and it falls on deaf ears, or ears that either cannot or will not acknowledge the answers that the child so desperately needs.

“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.“

I read My Name Is Lucy Barton in about four hours, and discovered it while I was considering Strout’s newer release Anything is Possible. Apparently, Lucy Barton connects the two stories, but I’m not clear how yet. It looks like something I would enjoy so I opted to go ahead and read My Name is Lucy Barton before reading Anything is Possible. I expect to read the new one in a couple of months.

I need to read more of Elizabeth Strout’s work. She truly is a master of her craft and I feel like I might be missing out by not doing so.

Let me know if you have read any of her work, and what your thoughts are. Cheers!

-E

Note: This post was not sponsored in any way.

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rosemary logan

This authors character development is exquisite….she conveys who people are with small movements .

Reviewed in Canada on February 6, 2023

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I liked the book. A lot. Had previously read Lucy by the Sea by the same author and used this to further inform me as to why Lucy was who she was.

Kristin Hogk

A beautifully human story

Reviewed in Germany on February 14, 2024

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“Her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition” (p 98), and this is what Elizabeth Strout is pretty good at. In a comparatively small book with comparatively little text she lets her protagonist, Lucy Barton, look back on a time she had to spent in hospital, away from her two little children, away from her husband and her everyday duties. Her situation of having to stay in a hospital gives her room and time for reflection, but also for rare talks with her mother, who comes to visit her for five days. It’s obviously meant to be a story – a very troubled story – of a daughter and her mother, who were never close or dear with another. And still, there is still love and there’ll always be love. Strout manages to say the important things and, at the same time, leaves many things unsaid because they cannot be said due to the distance between mother and child. She astonishes the reader with this strange, distant relationship without judging the mother or leaving her unlikeable. Many of Lucy’s thoughts are being shared, concerning her writing (“And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone!” p 24, “Never ever defend your work.” p 107), her insecurities (“As has often been the case with me, I began to dread this in advance.” p 75), her motherhood or her marriage, which she knows at the point of writing will not last. (“There are days when I feel I Iove him more than I did when I was married to him, but that is an easy thing to think – we are free of each other, and yet not, and never will be.” p 148) They are common thoughts packed in a rather simple, lean language and sentence structure, often written just as she would speak them. And therein lies the beauty for me, because it made it so easy to dive into that world, every now and then recognizing Lucy’s thoughts as my own.

Singh, R.

Bartons’ New York Story

Reviewed in India on February 16, 2021

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What a lovely, breezy read! This is Lucy Barton and this is the story of her childhood and her life as a grown woman. Lucy is in hospital and her mother comes to visit her and that’s where the story really begins. It is the presence of her mother that takes her back to her home in Illinois. She revisits places, people she had known, the gossips of small town that seemed lost in her New York life. She begins looking into her own marriage, men whom she has admired and disliked, women whom she has loved and not forgotten. and all the kindness and heartlessness she has withstood from people she would never meet again. How common her life was to ours! This was a beautifully written novel. Strout writes with simplicity, with a tone that makes you want to sit down and breathe. That’s what her writing felt like, a breathe of air; you inhale and let go with every turn of the page. In such a small book, the author has said so many things and not for a second making it sound unreal or impossible. It really seemed as though Lucy isn’t fictional. She is real, she is someone you have known but never cared to listen to because your life was busy figuring out your story. It seemed she was a woman you would pass by on the street, or a neighbour looking out the window with a smile to acknowledge a bright, sunny day.

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Joanne Sheppard

Beautifully written, understated novel of fractured relationships

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 24, 2019

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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.

60 people found this helpful

Alysson Oliveira

Precisamos falar sobre Elizabeth Strout

Reviewed in Brazil on April 24, 2017

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Há muito pouco de Elizabeth Strout publicado no Brasil – infelizmente. Apenas seu penúltimo romance MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON (aqui, Meu nome é Lucy Barton, com tradução de Sara Grünhagen), o que é uma pena, pois os leitores brasileiros não estão tendo acesso a uma das maiores escritoras americanas da atualidade. Nem OLIVE KITTERIDGE, ganhador do Pulizer de Ficção em 2009 e base de uma série estrelada por Frances McDormand, ganhou uma tradução no Brasil.

A obra da escritora tem ao centro personagens femininas e seus dilemas cotidianos. Há algo em Strout que lembra Alice Munro, embora o cenário seja outro, mas a delicadeza e precisão com que constróis perfis e tramas a partir destes a americana tem em comum com a canadense. O romance Lucy Barton é algo raro no gênero, sempre tão preocupado com a formação de personagens masculinos. Aqui temos um romance de formação que recusa o rótulo e traz como protagonista uma mulher.

Narrada pela própria Lucy que tem a vantagem de olhar para o passado e revisitar episódios de sua vida, a trama se passa durante cinco noites nos anos de 1980, quando ela estava num hospital em Nova York, onde tirou o apêndice, mas ainda convalesce de uma doença que os médicos não conseguem diagnosticar. Inesperadamente sua mãe, com quem não fala há anos, aparece no hospital, e isso traz à tona memórias da infância.

Os anos de formação da personagem são contados de forma quase factual. Strout não deixa se levar por sentimentalismos, sua precisão ajuda a dimensionalizar Lucy, e sua infância solitária, que, conforme ela confidencia, a levaram a se tornar uma escritora. E isso persiste até essa vida adulta, na qual é divorciada e mãe de duas filhas pequenas. E essa doença misteriosa que a mantém por meses no hospital? Poderia ser algo psicossomático que se cura com a presença da mãe e a reconciliação das duas.

Apesar da mãe ser faladora, cheia de histórias sobre pessoas que as duas conhecem, ou conheciam, é nos silêncios que elas se entendem. É quando aquilo que não precisa ser dito emerge que elas podem olhar olhos nos olhos (nem que seja simbolicamente), ver a verdade de uma na outra. Strout parece conhecer isso muito bem. Suas personagens são repletas de nuances, assim como os laços que as une. É também um prazer encontrar um romance sobre a formação emocional e o amadurecimento de uma mulher – atualmente, Elena Ferrante, com seu quarteto napolitano é outra que tem feito isso – num gênero tão dominado pelos ritos de passagem de garotos para homens.

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