My fellow bookclubber read and highly recommended this one, so I read it over the Thanksgiving weekend. Like previous Strout reads, this one was very good.
Lucy Barton is an author and mother in New York. She grew up in poverty and with a disturbed family, and was able to break away from that by attending college and marrying away from her community. In this story, Lucy is in the hospital, fighting off a mysterious post-op infection after a burst appendix. Lucy’s husband has brought her estranged mother to New York to visit and care for Lucy in the hospital for a few days. The story alternates between conversations between Lucy and her mother and Lucy’s memories of her childhood, her own children, her marriage, and her development as a writer.
There was a line by the Mother, one that appears twice, that I found heavy with meaning: “I have a tongue in my head, and I used it.” This comes across as weighted with meaning, as part admonishment of Lucy for her concern about her mother’s inability to navigate the world and part irony from someone who can’t say “I love you” to her own daughter. Strout’s writing, like in the Kitteridge books, is very well crafted, able to say so much in small ways throughout. The impact of past experiences on Lucy (and on Sarah Payne, another fictional author in the story) are both big and subtle at the same time.
I wouldn’t say I adored it, but I did enjoy it very much and am looking forward to the other Lucy books to get to know her more.
Fate: keeping this one as I work through the series.
8 – female author
11 – referral
14 – a name in the title
36 – part of a series
rclr 
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