She grew up on the fringes of a small town in Illinois and spent some years living in the garage of a great uncle. Lucy’s childhood was one of considerable poverty.
It is also a story of beginnings and the way people are shaped by their backgrounds. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.My Name Is Lucy Barton encompasses Lucy’s marriage and her path to becoming a writer, but it is in the intimacy of these five days, with Lucy’s mother taking catnaps in the chair beside her bed, that we come to understand the nature of the bond between them. 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. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Now, in My Name Is Lucy Barton, this extraordinary writer shows how a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all - the one between mother and daughter. Her bestselling novels, including Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys, have illuminated our most tender relationships. 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.Ī new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is cause for celebration.
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. 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. 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. There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.
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