My Name Is Lucy Barton

Words Unsaid

Pulitzer-winning author Elizabeth Strout’s new book, My Name Is Lucy Barton, is slim austere and intermittently moving.  It’s one of those novels you wish would go on for a little longer, you’ve just about started to understand and sympathise with the characters when it ends abruptly.

The eponymous heroine is lying in hospital after an appendix operation, when her mother suddenly materializes at the foot of her bed. Her husband, who has to cope with work and two kids, has called her and made all arrangements for her travel.  It might seem like the most natural thing to do, but Lucy’s relationship with her mother has been strained, and her German husband is the cause.  Lucy’s father fought in the War and hates Germans, and his wife behaves towards the son-in-law the way her husband expects her to.

The mother’s solid presence reassures Lucy—the older woman seems to be awake at all times, and eat nothing or very little. But what the two women do in between visits by nurses (to whom they allot nicknames) and a very kind doctor, is talk about the past. The mother tells her what happened to the people Lucy used to know back in their old home.

What Lucy remembers mostly is being so poor that her schoolmates didn’t want to be near her. (“We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois.”)  She has struggled to get out, and become a writer, the memories are not too pleasant. Her creative writing teacher, a taciturn author named Sarah Payne, tells her,  “You will have only one story… You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You will have only one.”  What is a writer to do if that story is on of deprivation and crushing solitude?

Lucy’s childhood has been unusually isolated—there is little food, no books or TV and no social circle. She writes, “Loneliness was the first flavour I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden in the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”

Because they are unable to talk about their pain and estrangement, the conversations the two women have in hospital are a way of the mother conveying to her that her life did turn out right after all.  Unlike Kathie Nicely, who ran off with another man and was spurned by her husband and children when the affair failed; or Mississippi Mary, whose seemingly perfect life fell apart when she discovered her husband’s affair with his secretary. And so on...a series of unhappy lives.

There is a sense of stillness in the novel, where silences and emotions not expressed also say a lot. Lucy became a writer because of her loneliness. Books, she says, “made me feel less alone. This is my point. And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone!”   Her own loneliness she continues to wear like armour.

My Name Is Lucy Barton

By Elizabeth Strout

Published by Random House

Pages: 193