My Name Is Lucy Barton is a NYTimes bestselling novel by Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of Olive Kitteridge. This was long-listed for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.
Strout is a masterful writer, but this unsentimental and unvarnished look at the life of a woman who spends nine weeks in the hospital lacked momentum for me.
Estranged from her family, Lucy is surprised when her mother arrives in her hospital room - her husband cannot abide hospitals and asked her mother to 'babysit' which she does for weeks, catnapping in a chair. They talk about relations and friends from the old days, her adult brother who still lives at home, and Lucy tests her mother with memories from her impoverished childhood - the family was always poor, living in a rural house that 'smelled'. While these linger, more serious issues of abuse remain in the dark. Lucy is inspired to write her memories down and begins a writing class well after her hospital stay. Her marriage has changed, and she questions how she is raising her own children.
The writing is so good this reads like a memoir - of a woman still coming to terms with her loveless childhood, perhaps some unknown trauma that is yet to arise. Strout is open and doesn't shy away from uncomfortable events, although I felt she never fully exposed them to the reader. Lucy and her brother have serious emotional issues, not to mention her absent sister. Lucy Barton is an interesting person, a well presented portrait of festering resentment, but lacking momentum and resolution towards the end.
This was made into a one-woman stage play premiering in London 2018, starring Laura Linney. As a character portrait, I can see an audience connecting with an actor, but as a novel I felt the curtain was still drawn.
2016 / Hardcover / 208 pages
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