“My Name is Lucy Barton” by Elizabeth Strout
I fell in writerly love with Elizabeth Strout when she spoke at a writer’s conference I attended. She had just finished writing OLIVE KITTERIDGE, with one of the finest character portrayals I’d read. Strout is a master at making us care about Olive, a woman brimming with anger and resentment. When I asked Strout for tips on writing about emotion, she said, “Take an emotion you’ve felt, and then blow it out of proportion in your character.” We humans are fraught with emotion, and fictional characters with whom we can identify offer us common human experiences when we read their stories.
In MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, Strout tackles the human experience of disconnecting from ourselves when we experience traumatic events. Lucy Barton, wife, mother, and writer, is in a New York hospital for eight weeks with a mysterious infection. She is shocked and thrilled when her mother, from whom she’s been estranged for years, flies in from the Midwest to help her.
As Lucy and her mother talk, or don’t talk (her mother is reticent, to say the least, about discussing much that’s personal), Lucy recalls her horribly impoverished, hurtful childhood. She reveals her past and her tentative longing for her mother’s care and understanding in a way that kept me eager for more, even as I recoiled from it.
As a psychotherapist, I’ve worked with a lot of abuse and neglect victims. I’ve always been struck by how strange and elusive memory can be, and impressed by how our psyches operate to keep us from remembering trauma. I don’t know Elizabeth Strout’s experience with trauma-based dissociation, but it’s clear in MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON that she “gets it”.
As I read the book, I found myself feeling like I imagine Lucy feels—disjointed, wondering, curious but afraid, eager for crumbs her mother might throw her, too afraid of abandonment to feel anger when crumbs don’t appear. I felt like I walked a few miles in Lucy’s shoes, and when, at the end, some, but not all, is revealed, I was not disappointed. That’s how we humans operate, remembering some things, blocking out others, grasping at meaning.
MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON is a quieter book than OLIVE KITTERIDGE, but it’s just as powerful. I highly recommend this story of a woman’s journey to discover and make sense of herself.
In MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, Strout tackles the human experience of disconnecting from ourselves when we experience traumatic events. Lucy Barton, wife, mother, and writer, is in a New York hospital for eight weeks with a mysterious infection. She is shocked and thrilled when her mother, from whom she’s been estranged for years, flies in from the Midwest to help her.
As Lucy and her mother talk, or don’t talk (her mother is reticent, to say the least, about discussing much that’s personal), Lucy recalls her horribly impoverished, hurtful childhood. She reveals her past and her tentative longing for her mother’s care and understanding in a way that kept me eager for more, even as I recoiled from it.
As a psychotherapist, I’ve worked with a lot of abuse and neglect victims. I’ve always been struck by how strange and elusive memory can be, and impressed by how our psyches operate to keep us from remembering trauma. I don’t know Elizabeth Strout’s experience with trauma-based dissociation, but it’s clear in MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON that she “gets it”.
As I read the book, I found myself feeling like I imagine Lucy feels—disjointed, wondering, curious but afraid, eager for crumbs her mother might throw her, too afraid of abandonment to feel anger when crumbs don’t appear. I felt like I walked a few miles in Lucy’s shoes, and when, at the end, some, but not all, is revealed, I was not disappointed. That’s how we humans operate, remembering some things, blocking out others, grasping at meaning.
MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON is a quieter book than OLIVE KITTERIDGE, but it’s just as powerful. I highly recommend this story of a woman’s journey to discover and make sense of herself.
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