Strout has made herself vulnerable to further autobiographical readings with the character of Lucy Barton, a writer who grew up in an isolated and strict family in a small rural town in Illinois (Strout grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire), and now lives in New York, having found writing success later in her life. When US radio host Terry Gross recently mentioned the suicides that run through the Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Strout conceded: “There is a history of suicide in my family, and I think that it’s always been very compelling to me as a result,” but declined to elaborate.
In 2008 Strout published Olive Kitteridge, a collection of 13 short stories set in the small fictional town of Crosby, Maine, in which the lives of its residents, in all their public disappointments and private desires, thread through the life of Olive, a retired schoolteacher who’s as unwitting in her tyranny as she is in her kindness. But readers, more than ever, are also interested in the author. “Character, I’m just interested in character,” she says. Her five novels have begun “always, always” with a person, and her eyes and ears are forever open to these small but striking human moments, squirrelling them away for future use. There are pieces of me in every character, because that’s my starting point, I’m the only person I know
They’re all meditations prompted by the arrival of her estranged mother, whose expressions of love are even more compromised than the doctor’s raised fist. These nine weeks of her recovery become a lifetime – figuratively in terms of her boredom and loneliness, and structurally, as Lucy tells the story of her childhood, marriage and, most important of all, how she became a writer. Lucy is recovering in hospital after a mysterious infection following the removal of her appendix. In both its deficiency (an expression of tenderness curbed by protocols both professional and personal) and its sincerity (the militant earnestness of the salute), the gesture seems to contain everything Strout is saying about love: that it’s hard and awkward and will always be inadequately expressed, but that it’s also something we need to grab and hold in our fists. E arly in Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, the narrator, a doctor, after wishing his patient good night and leaving her hospital bedside, “made a fist and kissed it, then held it in the air as he unswished the curtain and left the room”.
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