551. My Name is Lucy Barton
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Elizabeth Strout
Genre: Fiction
193 pages, published January 12, 2016
Reading Format: Book
Summary
While Lucy Barton, the titular protagaonist, is in a New York City hospital recovering slowly from an confounding infection following an appendectomy, her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to visit and stay with her. Through mulitiple conversations, Lucy and her mother navigate a difficult past relationship and come to an understanding that finally brings some peace to Lucy.
Quotes
“It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”
“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”
“You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
“Then I understood I would never marry him. It’s funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one’s past, or one’s clothes, but then—a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh.”
“Because we all love imperfectly.”
“But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”
“But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone.”
“You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.”
“This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.”
“No one in this world comes from nothing.”
“I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another’s hearts.”
“I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that’s what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.”
“I suspect I said nothing because I was doing what I have done most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don’t know they have embarrassed themselves. I do this, I think, because it could be me a great deal of the time.”
“… and that was when I learned that work gets done if you simply do it.”
“My more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, “Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!”
“There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too—unexpected—when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation.”
“Sarah Payne, the day she told us to go to the page without judgment, reminded us that we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.”
“I took myself—secretly, secretly—very seriously! I knew I was a writer. I didn’t know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.)”
“It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government—education, food, rent subsidies—are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government.”
“She said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.”
“A person gets tired. The mind or the soul or whatever word we have for whatever is not just the body gets tired, and this, I have decided, is—usually, mostly—nature helping us. I was getting tired. I think—but I don’t know—that he was getting tired too.”
“At times these days I think of the way the sun would set on the farmland around our small house in the autumn. A view of the horizon, the whole entire circle of it, if you turned, the sun setting behind you, the sky in front becoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again, as though it could not stop going on in its beauty, then the land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark. As though the soul can be quiet for those moments. All life amazes me.”
“I think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless to be a writer. And I think how I did not go visit my brother and sister and my parents because I was always working on a story and there was never enough time. (But I didn’t want to go either.) There never was enough time, and then later I knew if I stayed in my marriage I would not write another book, not the kind I wanted to, and there is that as well. But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.”
“What I mean is, this is not just a woman’s story. It’s what happens to a lot of us, if we are lucky enough to hear that detail and pay attention”
“Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture. I read his autobiography as soon as I could. And I remembered the line he said: “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.”
“But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make.”
“Do I understand that hurt my children feel? I think I do, though they might claim otherwise. But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: this is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”
“There is that constant judgment in this world: How are we going to make sure we do not feel inferior to another?”
My Take
After reading and really enjoying three previous books by the Pulitizer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again, and The Burgess Boys), I picked this book up from the “Librarian Recommends” section of my wonderful Boulder Public Library. While not quite as good as the other Strout books that I have read, I did really enjoy “My Name is Lucy Barton.” Strout has a lot of insight into the human condition and writes in such a way that you become engrossed in the lives of the characters and want to see what happens to them.
