Elizabeth Strout
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout unfolds in the first-person point of view of a writer desperate to reconcile with her estranged mother and struggling to make sense of her upbringing in a dysfunctional and abusive family. The novel is framed as an extended flashback.
Lucy Barton spends several weeks in hospital after experiencing complications from a routine surgery. She wakes up one morning only to find her estranged mother sitting in her hospital room. Her mother’s unexpected presence conjures up childhood memories. The mother-daughter dialogue is tentative at first. But eventually they get into the swing of gossiping about Lucy’s friends from school, who is married, who is divorced, and whatever happened to so-and so. Peppered throughout are descriptions of Lucy’s poverty-ridden childhood, a childhood riddled with deprivation and suggesting cruelty and abuse. Lucy skirts around these issues, never confronting her mother for fear of upsetting her.
The novel consists of a series of vignettes from Lucy’s childhood interspersed with conversations with her mother. Lucy values the change she hears in her mother’s voice when she adopts a story-telling voice in speaking of the people they knew. It makes no difference what her mother says as long as she continues to talk. Lucy is eager to garner whatever information she can about her father’s time in the war and about her mother’s struggles with raising children. But her mother is never forthcoming with details. She prefers to engage in gossipy babble.
Lucy flashes back to her childhood, her marriage, her two children, and her struggles to become a writer. She flashes forward, briefly mentioning the death of her mother, her divorce years after her hospital stay, and her re-marriage. But the information is fragmentary, so the reader never gets a complete picture.
Very little happens in the novel. But in the character of Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout has created a complex woman desperate to connect with her mother while trying to come to terms with her past. She reverts to her childlike self when hearing her mother’s story-telling voice. But as an adult, she craves more. She wants recognition and acknowledgement of her accomplishments from a woman who is incapable of giving it openly.
This is a story of a woman who loves her mother and a mother who loves her daughter but is incapable of showing it. What emerges is the complex nature of this mother-daughter relationship, a relationship fraught with tension. Simmering underneath their love for one another is a layer of unexpressed emotions, unasked questions, repressed recriminations, and buried pain. Elizabeth Strout captures the tension in straightforward diction and a detached tone devoid of sentimentality.