Wrap-up of My Name is Lucy Barton

“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life…”

And that loneliness seeped into the very soul of Lucy Barton isolating her from much of the world despite marriage, children, and a successful writing career.

The story opens in a hospital room where Lucy, as a married adult with two small children, is convalescing from some mysterious complication following an ordinary appendectomy. Upon awakening one day she discovers her mother at her bedside – the mother she hasn’t seen for many years.

Mother. Comfort. Safety. Well, not exactly. Lucy’s life had begun in her uncle’s garage with little heat or water and fiber-glass walls for décor. In addition, her father had returned from the war with tortuous memories of murder and mayhem that skewed each wakening day. And the mother watched.

As a five-year-old Lucy was sometimes locked in her father’s dilapidated old pick-up as an alternative to child-care while both parents worked and the other siblings were at school. The sheer desperation of her tears streamed down through all of her days, in some ways locking her in that truck, with the one-time snake, forever.

Lucy escaped to college and later New York City, from garage to Chrysler Building. She never grasped, nor recovered from the wonder of it all. When she married a wealthy German, William, his mother proclaimed to her friends, “Lucy came from nothing.” Nothing or everything.

Meanwhile back at the hospital, Lucy discovers her husband had sent her mother air-fare to facilitate her visit .When she asks her mother, how she managed to navigate from their small town of Amgash, Illinois, to New York City – she replies tartly, “I have a tongue in my head and I used it.”  For once.

For five days, Mother and daughter tiptoe through the silent years, gossiping about home-town friends with failed marriages or other disappointments, speculating about the nurses giving them names like Toothache or Cookie, light-heartedly passing the hours – and avoiding all sleeping dogs in the room.

Aside from the sizable gift of presence, her mother is unable to bridge the gaping emotional ravine between them and all of Lucy’s longing cannot pull her to the other side. And so they remain, while an extraordinarily kind doctor shores up her sorrow, gently laying a hand on her healing scars.

Elizabeth Strout’s brilliant little volume shines with compassion, but its truth is delivered with rapier thrusts. “Everyone loves imperfectly,” claims one friend. Despite the sadness, Lucy blossoms under random kindnesses – from a gay friend, a mentor, a neighbor. Having been born into pain, she inadvertently delivers some to her own daughters, through a divorce and remarriage, but still she remains steadfast, acknowledging the pain “we hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: this is mine, this is mine.” The book closes with her remembering with gratitude the last soft light of day on the Illinois farmland.

But in the title she owns it all.

 My name is Lucy Barton.