Elizabeth Strout’s Fierce, Unforgettable My Name Is Lucy Barton

When we meet Lucy, she is trapped, wasting away in a Manhattan hospital from a mystery ailment, and yearning for her husband and two daughters. They are her present, the facts of the current life she has worked so hard to put together for herself after escaping from a rough, rural childhood in Amgash, Illinois. Instead of getting to enjoy them, though, she’s joined by her past: her mother, from whom she has long been estranged.
Lucy’s mother sits up with her day after day, watching over her daughter like the attentive guardian she was never able to be when Lucy was a child. The family was poor then, poor in a way rarely dealt with in contemporary literature, so poor that Lucy, her parents, and her two siblings lived for years in an unheated garage.
Lucy’s memories of that time are as raw as a Midwestern winter and as sharp as the pink fiberglass insulation in the garage that she was warned never to touch. But she retains very little bitterness, only some confusion over aspects of her childhood she still doesn’t understand. Why, for example, did she feel so apart and alone growing up? “Lonely was the first flavor I tasted in my life,” she tells us, “and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth.”
And why was she left alone for long stretches in the cab of her father’s truck, in one ruinous case in the company of a snake? During those times of captivity, Lucy had to take care of herself through her own powers of imagination:
I dreamed of not being cold, of having clean sheets, clean towels, a toilet that worked … I allowed myself into heaven this way.
Were those episodes punishments, or were they for her protection? Were they related to the abuse she alludes to? Her mother does not do much to help clarify Lucy’s understanding of her past, but, simply by being there, she helps Lucy come to terms with it.
Lucy’s illness functions as a metaphor for a do-over childhood. This time, her mother plays the role of Mother and, in a similar way, Lucy’s doctor, a kindly older man who checks in on her and supervises her healing process, plays the role of Father. Lucy feels safe with both of them. She loves both of them. The hospital provides warmth, clean sheets and towels, and a toilet that works. With these pieces in place, she is able to heal.
When Lucy emerges from the hospital, though, she is no longer the same woman she was when she went in. She finds herself a different mother, a different wife. Her family has changed as well, and so has her chosen family: one of her friends and neighbors has disappeared. The world shuffled itself in her absence.
She’s still a writer, though, and it’s through writing that she tries to understand how her present relates to her past, as well as how both can help her put together a future for herself. She is, at heart, a survivor. She can go on, as long as she has the stories she remembers and the ones she can tell.