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Exploring Family Trauma in “My Name Is Lucy Barton”

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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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 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

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2019

THE LAST LETTER

by Rebecca Yarros ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 2019

A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.

A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.

Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ ( Wilder , 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Entangled: Amara

Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

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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.

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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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, my name is lucy barton.

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON is a title that announces itself with "Call me Ishmael" forthrightness. And Elizabeth Strout’s haunting new novel is, in fact, a kind of book-within-a-book, framed as a memoir or possibly an autobiographical novel. It is brief (207 pages) but memorably intense, with an eponymous protagonist who is a worthy successor to Olive Kitteridge.   

Winning the Pulitzer Prize may give a writer a certain freedom to experiment. MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON , in any case, while eventful and certainly not plotless, has an idiosyncratic, nonlinear structure. Its core is Lucy’s lengthy stay in a New York City hospital (complications following an appendectomy) and the five-day surprise visit she receives from her mother (“surprise” because she is barely in touch with her family). This interlude becomes the lens through which Lucy contemplates her life, past and future. The story unfolds in an elliptical, almost kaleidoscopic pattern, as if we are collecting random shards of her memory. But nothing is random in this exquisitely subtle book.

I’m afraid I’m making MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON sound “hard” the way Virginia Woolf’s fiction can be hard: cryptic, elusive. It is nothing of the kind. Somehow Strout makes Lucy’s recollections seem natural, as if she is free-associating, while taking care to orient the reader as to time and place. The novel is not obscure, but it is genuinely mysterious.

Lucy’s mother is compellingly enigmatic. On the one hand, here is a woman who lives in rural Illinois, where Lucy grew up, and has never before taken an airplane. Nevertheless, she flies to New York to be with her daughter. Endearingly, she calls Lucy by her pet name, Wizzle, and refuses a cot, keeping watch from a chair at her bedside all night, every night. “Her being there…made me feel warm and liquid-filled,” Lucy thinks, “as though all my tension had been a solid thing and now was not.” When Lucy urges her to sleep, her mother says she took catnaps throughout her childhood: “You learn to, when you don’t feel safe.” But safe from what? The implication is that Lucy’s mother was somehow abused (though shorthand of that sort is the very opposite of what this book defines as honest writing).

"MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON evokes shades of feeling so accurately and unsentimentally that moralizing labels , too often applied to everything from childhood to marriage, begin to seem both clunky and wrong. The book reveals the world in all its complexity: the humanity along with the cruelty, the beauty as well as the pain."

The contradictions arrive when we learn, through Lucy’s recollections, that this dream mother verged on nightmare. The family was desperately poor. The parents hit the children. Lucy’s mother made shaming remarks about her adolescent body. And she failed to protect her against “ the Thing, ” Lucy’s term for unnamed, probably sexual episodes involving her volatile father.

Lucy was raised “with so little --- only the inside of my head to call my own” that she learned to live in her imagination, and that turns out to be a great strength. She discovers books (“They made me feel less alone”) and determines to write her own; she goes to college and moves to New York. When her mother asks how she can live in the city, without sky, she replies, “There’s people instead.”

In New York, Lucy marries, has two daughters, and becomes a successful writer who tries to tell the truth about her life. But what is the truth? No great revelations mark the visit. For the most part, Lucy and her mother speak in an odd coded language. They give nicknames to the nurses and chat about hometown scandals, stories of women with failed marriages --- perhaps a reflection of her parents’ troubled relationship, or an anticipation of the time that Lucy will leave her own husband and children (as her mother did not).

Clearly, the visit is important to them both. Lucy says over and over how happy it makes her. Yet her mother’s love is ambiguous and oddly inarticulate; she is both warm and apparently cold. Lucy accepts that: “I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you. I feel that people may not understand: It was all right.”  

That’s the thing about family: It has you whether you like it or not. As Lucy puts it, “our roots were twisted…tenaciously around one another’s hearts.” That is true also of her own daughters, so angry and distant after the divorce. Yet one of them, Becka, in a moment of pure terror --- when she sees the second plane hit on the morning of September 11 --- cries out “Mommy!”

It could be Lucy calling for her own mother.

Strout seems to be saying that both tenderness and ruthlessness are required for a woman to find her own way --- and for a writer to tell her own truth. Lucy has a sort of radar for other people’s pain, fatigue, desperation. Yet that’s not enough; to evolve as a writer, she also needs to be tough. Sarah Payne, a writer and teacher who becomes important to Lucy, tells her: “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.”

Lucy’s narrative voice has a wonderful sense of detail and texture; it’s naturally poetic. But I don’t mean “poetic” in the sense of fancy literary language; the beauty is more in the cadence of her sentences. Considering kids she sees in the subway, she writes, “[O]nce 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.” Or this, remembering the day she took her husband home to meet her parents: “[I]t was early June, and the soybeans were on one side, a sharp green, lighting up the slighting sloping fields with their beauty, and on the other side was the corn, not yet as high as my knees, a bright green…..”

At the very end of the novel, Strout comes back to Lucy’s vision of her childhood home: “[T]he land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of the horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark. As though the soul can be quiet for those moments.” The choice to end on this note is meaningful, for despite the gloom of Lucy’s past, she is able to recall the radiance of the farmland around her small, mean house --- the same house in which she felt such anguish.

In this, Lucy --- and Strout herself --- is following another piece of advice from Sarah Payne: to “come to the page without judgment.” MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON evokes shades of feeling so accurately and unsentimentally that moralizing labels , too often applied to everything from childhood to marriage, begin to seem both clunky and wrong. The book reveals the world in all its complexity: the humanity along with the cruelty, the beauty as well as the pain.

Reviewed by Katherine B. Weissman on January 14, 2016

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

• Publication Date: October 11, 2016
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• ISBN-10: 0812979524
• ISBN-13: 9780812979527

Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: my name is lucy barton by elizabeth strout, about the book:.

A heart-wrenching story of mothers and daughters from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of  Olive Kitteridge .

A mother comes to visit her daughter in hospital after having not seen her in many years. Her unexpected visit forces Lucy to confront her past, uncovering long-buried memories of a profoundly impoverished childhood; and her present, as the façade of her new life in New York begins to crumble, awakening her to the reality of her faltering marriage and her unsteady journey towards becoming a writer.

From Lucy’s hospital bed, we are drawn ever more deeply into the emotional complexity of family life, the inescapable power of the past, and the memories – however painful – that bind a family together.

Published by Penguin Random House Australia

Released October 2016

My Thoughts:

I attended Elizabeth Strout’s session at MWF Digital a few years back and since then, have been steadily picking up copies of her books as I see them. But Bronwyn, over at Brona’s Books, is the one who finally gave me the prompt to read one with her recent review of Lucy by the Sea , and here we are, first one done and dusted. What a marvel Elizabeth Strout is, and what a character she has created in Lucy Barton.

It’s hard to describe what this novel is about. A young woman telling her story from a hospital bed? Hardly inspires a literary pulse. But essentially, that’s what it is. But of course, it’s also so much more. It’s a story of a woman who has left her poverty stricken and abusive rural childhood behind, at least physically, but emotionally, she is very much still tethered to it. As she recovers in hospital from a long illness and is visited for a week by her mother, their conversations, along with Lucy’s introspection and reflections on different encounters from both the past and the present, form a picture of who Lucy is, how she came to be living in New York with two daughters and a husband, estranged from her family, and where she might be headed.

It’s a deeply personal novel. The power of it lays in what is left unsaid, the things Lucy can’t say, but only allude to. And yet, despite its gravity, it’s also incredibly uplifting. I loved Lucy’s voice, her strength and her vulnerability. I’ll definitely be reading the rest of this series sooner rather than later. Thanks Bron!

Book 18 in my 22 in 2022 challenge.

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8 thoughts on “ book review: my name is lucy barton by elizabeth strout ”.

Delighted you’ve got started with Lucy. I was sure you two would get on 🙂 It’s interesting to learn more about her childhood as the other stories continue and the impact this time still has on adult life. And as you say, it’s very subtle and a lot happens within the things unsaid space.

Like Liked by 1 person

I’ll be reading more of them sooner rather than later. Such a marvellous character!

I must get this one. I recently read Oh William and that was very powerful, wetting my appetite for more of Lucy Barton.

You must be able to read them out of order then?

I’m not sure.

But Oh William talks about her books so perhaps it’s a ploy to get us to buy them. 😀

I liked Olive but I didn’t fall in love with her. I fell in love with Lucy, despite all her faults! I’ve read all four books now and I love them all.

I’m looking forward to the rest of them. I have the Olive books as well, based on other recommendations for them before I’d even heard of Lucy.

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A review of My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout Random House Trade Paperback: 224 pages, November 29, 2016, ISBN-13: 978-0812979527

Elizabeth Strout’s new book, My Name is Lucy Barton , begins with, “There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.” This nine-week hospital stay is woven throughout the whole book as Lucy’s story unfolds. A key focus of the book is the relationship between a mother and her daughter, which is seen when Lucy’s mother visits her in the hospital for five days. Lucy was in the hospital because she was not recovering after her appendix was removed. This hospital stay is a parallel to the years of struggle that Lucy has lived through as they both take a long time to heal.

Lucy is both the main character and the narrator of her story. Her story is one of love and loneliness, of outcasts and acceptance, of fear of dying and living life, and of relationships. Each of the short chapters gives the reader a deeper understanding of who Lucy Barton is as a woman and who she was as a child. Every story told in the book is written as a past memory and Lucy intertwines her own reflections as she tells her story. The story is told through the narrator’s point of view in the same fashion one would write a memoir about his or her own life. What Elizabeth Strout has done so brilliantly is convinced readers that Lucy’s life is real and we are a part of it.

Before the hospital stay, Lucy was estranged from her family in rural Illinois while she had begun her own family in New York. When Lucy writes about her experiences as a child, I was filled with sadness for the poverty and lack of love in her life. Lucy grew up impoverished, but refused to let that stop her as she earned a free ride to college where she continued to succeed. However, Lucy’s success and her moving away from her family created a rift that is never truly mended. In fact, when Lucy’s mom visited her in the hospital, it was the first time they had seen each other in years.

The book continues in the non-linear narrative as Lucy ties together her journey of discovering who she was – a writer. The loneliness of her life, especially in childhood, drove Lucy to the realization that she would write and write so that people would not feel so alone:

But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone. This is my point. And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone! (But it was my secret. Even when I met my husband I didn’t tell him right away. I couldn’t take myself seriously. Except that I did. I took myself—secretly, secretly—very seriously! I knew I was a writer. I didn’t know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.)

The story of My Name is Lucy Barton beautifully fulfills Lucy’s dream of being a writer and makes the reader feel connected and no longer alone in the world. The whole book is a story of Lucy writing a book about her life. As the reader, I was drawn into the beauty and pain of Lucy’s life. The beauty of this book is found in how this lovely work of fiction manifests itself to be real and relevant to the reader’s life.

As I read this beautiful novel, I felt like I was by Lucy’s side and was privy to her deepest thoughts and desires. Although our past experiences and ages are very different, I felt connected to Lucy through her desire to write. I like how Lucy interrogates herself to come to the truth and self-discovery about how she felt and perceived things in the past that are now memories. Lucy’s journey into and during adulthood is very encouraging to me as a college student because I can see how the mistakes and joys that Lucy experiences help her to grow become her own person. My Name is Lucy Barton engulfed me in a world of struggles outside of my own, yet I was able to sympathize with Lucy because, by the end of the book, she was my friend.

Lucy is both the main character and the narrator of her story. Her story is one of love and loneliness, of outcastes and acceptance, of fear of dying and living life, and of relationships. Each of the short chapters gives the reader a deeper understanding of who Lucy Barton is as a woman and who she was as a child. Every story told in the book is written as a past memory and Lucy intertwines her own reflections as she tells her story. The story is told through the narrator’s point of view in the same fashion one would write a memoir about his or her own life. What Elizabeth Strout has done so brilliantly is convinced readers that Lucy’s life is real and we are a part of it.

About the reviewer:  Jeanne Palmateer is a senior at Bethel College, Indiana. She is pursuing a major in English and Writing. After graduating, she plans to continue writing and working within the literary community.

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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

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• First Published:
• Jan 5, 2016, 208 pages
• Oct 2016, 224 pages

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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 by Elizabeth Strout

• Publication Date: October 11, 2016
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• ISBN-10: 0812979524
• ISBN-13: 9780812979527
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Book review: ‘my name is lucy barton’.

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON

By Elizabeth Strout

Random House, $26, 191 pages

“You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one … If there is a weakness in your story, address it head-on, take it in your teeth and address it, before the reader really knows.”

Lucy Barton receives this advice from writer/teacher Sarah Payne, who becomes a guiding light to Lucy, the main character and voice of Elizabeth Strout’s new, remarkable novel about unspoken love, emotional prisons, mother-daughter relationships and the ability to find the center of one’s being.

“My Name is Lucy Barton” is a book of deep insight, of delicate feelings, fine writing and elusive events. Miss Strout has more than one story to tell, but her stories return to many of the same motifs. Adolescent fear and bravery, the role of the outsider, the nature of friendship and the loneliness of the human soul were all part of “The Burgess Boys” and prize-winning “Olive Kitteridge,” just as they infuse this graceful, beautiful new book. It is not so much the plot, but how this particular story plays out in Lucy’s mind and heart that matters.

We are introduced to Lucy as she is spending nine weeks in a New York hospital recovering from a mysterious post-surgery infection. Her room looks out on the gleaming Chrysler Building, which serves as a beacon of hope for her recovery.

Then one day, she looks up and sees her mother, whom she has not seen since her marriage years ago, sitting at the foot of her hospital bed. Strangers to one another in many ways, the two women talk of the people Lucy knew at home in Amgash, Illinois. She finds great comfort in her mother’s presence and “soft rushed” voice.

Lucy grew up “in isolation” in a cornfield, an “outsider” ridiculed by other children on the school playground. There were no other houses around, just a single tree in the middle of the cornfield. “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” she says.

“O corn of my youth, you were my friend! — running and running between the rows, running as only a child, alone, in summer can run, running to the stark tree that stood in the midst of the cornfield.”

The family lived in a great-uncle’s garage “with only a trickle of cold water from a makeshift sink.” Supper “many nights was molasses on bread.” They did not have a television, newspapers or magazines or books in the house.

Without some form of instruction, Lucy wonders “how children become aware of what the world is, and how to act in it … 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?”

After high school, Lucy left Amgash; she went to college, moved to New York, married the son of a German World War II prisoner of war, had two daughters whom she loved dearly, and became a successful writer. She survived the infection. Years passed. She left her marriage and later remarried. It took time for her to learn how to act in the world, but she did.

Despite her escape from poverty and her pleasure in New York existence, “there are times … 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 sore and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived.” Which is how she first met Sarah Payne who encouraged her to write her story.

So she wrote her story — “things that had happened in my childhood home … things I’d found out in my marriage … things I could not say” — understanding that “I was doing what I have done most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don’t know they have embarrassed themselves. I did this, I think, because it could be me a great deal of the time.”

Lucy, in the end, is able to say, “This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go — to Amgash, Illinois — and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go!”

• Corinna Lothar is a Washington writer and critic.

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