![]() ![]() During her stay, she talks to her daughter ‘in a way I didn’t remember, as though a pressure of feeling and words and observations had been stuffed down inside her for years, and her voice was breathy and unselfconscious.’ The unfamiliar setting allows mother and daughter to connect on a new level: No one ever did.’ Her mother, with whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, spends five days with Lucy in the hospital. Protagonist and short story writer, Lucy Barton, reflects on the time in the mid-1980s when she was hospitalised for nine weeks following complications with an appendectomy: ‘No one could isolate any bacteria or figure out what had gone wrong. Her latest novel, My Name is Lucy Barton (Random House, Jan 2016) is a story about identity, family and trauma. Strout has several other books, including Amy and Isabelle(1998), Abide With Me(2007) and The Burgess Boys(2013) and is a highly-regarded short story writer. I fell in love Elizabeth Strout’s fiction when my old book club read her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge(2008). ![]() 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. ![]() … This must be the way most of us manourver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. ![]()
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