The half-way point seems like a good place to pause. What is it about names in this book? And I’m still wondering about the untypical sense of pride we can hear in that title. The only person important enough for that honour is an author Lucy meets, and who gives her the idea of becoming a real writer. But the doctor Lucy likes, the teacher who was kind to her, the artist lover at university who wasn’t – none of these get names. Her siblings, her husband, her own children… they all have names, as do the girls the family used to know who have life-stories that Lucy’s mother likes to tell. We never get to know her mother’s name, or her father’s, but most other people’s we do. From then on she always uses a nickname, Wizzle.
We don’t know for certain that it’s Lucy who is actually narrating until her mother calls her by her name, once, when she arrives to see her after a gap of something like ten years. is the perfect balance she achieves between the tides of story and depths of feeling." -Chicago Tribune " constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion." -USA Today "Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force." -The New Yorker " themes are how incompletely we know one another, how 'desperately hard every person in the world working to get what they need,' and the redemptive power in little things-a shared memory, a shock of tulips." - People.‘My Name is Lucy Barton,’ says – nobody in this short novel.
Praise for Elizabeth Strout "Strout has a magnificent gift for humanizing characters." -San Francisco Chronicle "What truly makes Strout exceptional. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Now, in My Name Is Lucy Barton, this extraordinary writer shows how a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all-the one between mother and daughter. novels, including Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys, have illuminated our most tender relationships. A new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is cause for celebration.
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