My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout: a book review and discussion questions

On the surface, “My Name is Lucy Barton” is the story about a complicated relationship between a writer and her mother. The novel opens when Lucy is in the hospital recovering from a mysterious complication following what should have been a simple surgery. One day during her hospital stay, Lucy’s mother, whom she hasn’t spoken to in many years, comes to visit. The unexpected opportunity to reconnect with her mother forces Lucy to confront memories of her difficult childhood in a dysfunctional and impoverished family. Although she hardly describes these memories directly, Lucy suggests that her father was abusive and that her mother was emotionally unavailable to children in the face of this violence. On a deeper level though, “My Name is Lucy Barton” is also the story of a woman trying to emerge whole from that trauma. Lucy is constantly trying to reconcile the tensions that exist within her—the longing for a sense of home with the desire to escape to New York, her trauma with her desire to become a writer, and her faltering marriage with her love for her two daughters and her desire to protect them from hurt in the way in which her mother was unable to protect her.

Elizabeth Strout has been praised for her unsentimental writing in “My Name is Lucy Barton.” One way in which she accomplishes this is through silence. What is not said in this novel is as important, and sometimes more important, than what is said. During the mother’s visit, she and Lucy spend most of the time gossiping about the women they used to know in their hometown of Amgash, Illinois and commenting on Lucy’s siblings and relatives. What they don’t talk about—what they seem unable to talk about—are Lucy’s memories of her trauma. They don’t talk about how violent Lucy’s father could be and the times when he might have been sexually abusive (what Lucy calls “the Thing” because she can’t name it directly). They don’t talk about how her mother too would sometimes hit the children. They don’t talk about Lucy’s brother, who is likely suffering from his own trauma (the mother tells Lucy that he still lives at home, reads children’s books and “sleeps next to the pigs that will be taken to slaughter” the next morning). And they never talk about Lucy’s current life as a successful writer. They also don’t talk about Lucy’s children or about her faltering marriage to a man whom Lucy’s mother seems to dislike. Whenever the stories of the other women, their mistakes and failed marriages, hit a little too close to home, Lucy and her mom grow quiet or change the subject before they have to admit how similar their situations are.

Lucy Barton, like her creator, is a writer, and she tells us that she became one because books gave her comfort during her lonely childhood. She wanted to offer that to other people. But is it not also likely that Lucy became a writer to make sense of her childhood trauma? The act of writing books implies, almost always, a desire for a reader. A desire to communicate with someone. To say “this is what happened to me,” and “this is who I am,” and also, a request to be heard and seen. How does a writer accomplish that when the facts of what happened are almost too horrible to say out loud?

There is a sense in “My Name is Lucy Barton” that sometimes speaking about what has happened to us can cause more damage. When Lucy asks herself why she sometimes doesn’t speak up, she writes, “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.” Speaking about trauma can recreate it in our minds, and unless there is someone present (a trained therapist, for example), who can help us navigate those memories, it can recreate the fear from the past . It seems that Lucy’s mother was not that person, and what is so clear in this pages is that even when Lucy wants to speak about her childhood, she is afraid. “In my memory of this,” she writes of one specific instance when her mother is speaking about a man who came back from Vietnman with PTSD, “I was the one to get us away as fast as we could now, as fast as we could, from where my mother may—or may not—have known she was headed.”

Perhaps though, Lucy’s reluctance to speak directly about her trauma comes from a belief that she must protect her parents. From whom? Certainly from us, the readers, who are likely to side with Lucy and condemn their behavior. But also from herself—the writer, who is exposing them to the world. Why else does Lucy insist on telling us what Sarah Payne said to her class about writing about others? “Sarah Payne…told us to go to the page without judgment, [and] reminded us that we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.” It seems that by not describing her parent’s abuses explicitly, Lucy was restraining her own judgment. She was allowing for the possibility that none of us, not even her, can really know why another person acts the way they do. She was, in other words, asking for our compassion towards her own imperfect parents, both of whom probably had PTSD. Is this not a lesson that this books can teach us? “I realize I don’t now how others are,” says Lucy. “All of life seems speculation.”

If Lucy’s silence is a way of protecting her parents, is it also self-destructive? Is she giving up her voice and her story in her reluctance to tell us what happened? At one point, Lucy sees a sculpture of a man with a tortured look on his face, who’s pulling at his mouth with his hands in a gesture of desperation while his children, who are at his feet, only look up at him. And then she says that a placard by the sculpture explained “that these children are offering themselves as food for their father, [who] is being starved to death in prison, and these children only want one thing—to have their father’s distress disappear.” Witnessing their father’s distress—which makes him unavailable to them—the children in the sculpture are sacrificing their own needs so that the father can be well again, so that he can return home and resume his duties as their caregiver. And then Lucy says that when she read this, she thought “So the guy knew. Meaning the sculptor. He knew.” Still, she doesn’t tell us precisely what it is that the sculptor knew and that she also knows, but she has told us enough that we may understand—she would have given up herself to see her parents be well.

All of which makes me think that the book’s title is about reclaiming the Self. Lucy is surprised—almost offended—that when she meets Sarah Payne, the writer is almost unable to say her own name. “I had to ask her name, and again I had the sense I’d caused her great embarrassment—she said in one breath: Sarah Payne.” Lucy judges Sarah’s reluctance to say who she is, and by the end of the novel, Lucy is determined to do the opposite. She is determined to assert herself. To be ruthless. To say, “This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go.” She doesn’t need to tell us much more, because she says it in the title, unabashedly, unapologetically, “My Name is Lucy Barton.”

Please, grab a copy of “My Name is Lucy Barton” by Elizabeth Strout and tell me what you thought about it in the comments.