A bond between mother, child
Daughter faces painful past she desperately tried to leave behind
The mother-daughter bond is one of the most charged of human relationships. Fraught with emotion at the best of times, it is the material of more than a few literary projects. But the subject has rarely been treated with the tenderness and care — and raw honesty — that the Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer Elizabeth Strout affords it in her latest novel, My Name is Lucy Barton.
The book finds its titular character in a hospital room in New York City in the 1980s, suffering from a mysterious infection that has separated her from her husband and two young daughters. She wakes to find her estranged mother at the foot of her bed, having travelled all the way from her childhood home in Amgash, Ill.
During the days that her mother stays — dozing in a hospital chair, calling her by her childhood pet name Wizzle and proffering endless comfort — the women find a way to move beyond superficial gossip about friends and family and work through their troubled history.
Confined to her bed, feverish and vulnerable, Lucy is forced to face the past she fled — the humiliating poverty and abuse that drove her to escape her tiny town and build a new life for herself as a middle-class married Manhattan writer.
Her mother’s presence unearths key pieces of this former life: the unheated garage the family lived in, the lack of food, the isolation and loneliness, the scorn visited upon the family by townsfolk. The mother who beat her. The sensitive brother who slept with the pigs before they were slaughtered. And the father who locked Lucy in his truck, helplessly inflicting on his own family the wartime trauma he experienced.
Piece by piece, Lucy examines this painful past, clear-eyed and without a trace of self-pity.
This redemptive journey — which is experienced through memory, conversation and unspoken understanding — is as much about Lucy reconciling herself to her history as it is about her finding a way to accept, and ultimately cherish, the love that she feels for the woman who has raised her. And to receive the gifts that her mother bestows upon her, in spite of all.
The writing here is superb: gorgeously crafted, thoughtful, moving in a quiet, understated way. Strout is deeply empathetic of the human condition and, in probing her character’s wounds, generous beyond measure.
My Name is Lucy Barton is the kind of book you open casually, read a page, and then find yourself closing many hours later, sighing in satisfaction, having finished the entire thing — and gained some important insights in the process. Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer.