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. Her father, who suffers severe PTSD, cannot hold down a job and she, her older brother and sister are marginalised both at school and in the town: 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. Lucy grows up in a poor and unhappy home: But mostly, Lucy talks about her childhood. She shares stories about her life in New York-which is impossibly distant from her childhood in Amgash, Illiois-and about her neighbours and a writer she meets by chance one afternoon in a clothing store and attends workshops with years later. Throughout, Lucy also discusses her two young daughters, her (then) fledgling writing career and her marriage, which is already showing signs of wear. Maybe it was the darkness with only the pale crack of light that came through the door, the constellation of the magnificent Chrysler Building right beyond us, that allowed us to speak in ways we never had. During her stay, she talks to her daughter ‘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.’ The unfamiliar setting allows mother and daughter to connect on a new level: No one ever did.’ Her mother, with whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, spends five days with Lucy in the hospital. Protagonist and short story writer, Lucy Barton, reflects on the time in the mid-1980s when she was hospitalised for nine weeks following complications with an appendectomy: ‘No one could isolate any bacteria or figure out what had gone wrong. Her latest novel, My Name is Lucy Barton (Random House, Jan 2016) is a story about identity, family and trauma. Strout has several other books, including Amy and Isabelle(1998), Abide With Me(2007) and The Burgess Boys(2013) and is a highly-regarded short story writer. I fell in love Elizabeth Strout’s fiction when my old book club read her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge(2008). 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. … This must be the way most of us manourver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.
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