Poured Over: Elizabeth Strout on Oh, William!

B&N: Elizabeth Strout thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Your new novel is Oh, William, it’s out today. And I have to confess, I love this guy. I love when I’m completely well, not completely, but I’m slightly mortified that I’m admitting that I’m completely in love with a fictional character who’s a bit of a CAD. And yet, he’s one of the more interesting guys I’ve met on the page in a really long time. Can I ask where this guy came from? I know he was in My Name is Lucy Barton. That’s where we meet him very briefly. But this is a whole nother book.

Elizabeth Strout: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It’s really lovely to be here talking to you. I’m awfully glad that you care about William because I found him intriguing myself. And it was very, very interesting how he sort of developed. I just understood who he was, from the moment I realized, okay, he’s a parasitologist. He spends his life looking into microscope. And yet, he obviously has cared about Lucy very deeply, in spite of all the different things they went through in the course of their marriage. So given the fact and given his apparent limitations in terms of being able to socially engaged all the time, I felt like I understood that there was some sense of integrity to him for me, and he is who he is. And I’m really glad to like them a lot. That makes me very happy.

B&N: You have a note at the back of this book, though, that thanks Laura Linney for her role in creating this book. So can we talk about that for a second?

ES: Sure. Because, honestly, Laura Linney played a one woman show, My Name is Lucy Barton, in London and also on Broadway. And I was at a rehearsal with her. And she took a step forward, and she murmured something about William. And she put her glasses on top of her head, and I will never forget it. Because at that moment, I thought, Oh, William. And that was the moment I realized, oh, let’s think about William because of course, he has a story. Everybody has their story. But she somehow he just lost them in the air. Oh, William. And so therefore I understood, and then I realized, Okay, well, we’ve got some facts about him already. And my name is Lucy Barton, we know that he’s the son of a prisoner of war, and that his mother ran off with the prisoner of war when he was up there, you know, working on indicata farm. So we know that much. And then I just really thought, Okay, let’s go with this and see.

B&N: And you’ve said in earlier interviews that you don’t write in a linear fashion that you create scenes? Yeah. And then you put them together. So do you remember the scene that brought you into the book that ultimately became Oh, William?

ES: Oh, that’s a good question. No. I don’t think that I do remember. No, no, I’m sorry. I don’t.

B&N: Okay. It was something that I was curious about only because we see William purely through Lucy’s lens. This is a first, right.

ES: Right. And that’s I find that that can be limiting. Because I’m very interested in different points of view, I just adore different points of view, which is why my my other books have, you know, all these different characters, and from their point of view is this from somebody else’s point of view is this. And so all of this has to be from Lucy’s point of view, because her voice is the driving force, I think of the book. And so I have to do it in a way that we see William only revealed through Lucy’s eyes, and yet, hopefully, other things that come in through her eyes that she may not even be aware of reporting to us, can give us a fuller feeling for who he is.

B&N: There are so many surprises throughout this book. It’s very slim. It’s a very tightly written and that’s part of the pleasure actually, of reading these very elegant sentences. I’m looking at my galley, it’s 237 pages, but these very elegant sentences, and yet they’re so revealing.

ES: Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, thank you. I think at this point, with Lucy’s voice. I have gotten into her voice enough to realize, okay, let’s just land right there. Or whatever.

B&N: And even though the book is set in the present day, you cover their entire marriage, which is 20 years, you cover Williams childhood and his mother, can we talk about Katherine for a second? She’s great.

ES: It was just wonderful, because I realized, Oh, wow. And that was not written in a linear way. But I understood as I was progressing through the book, as I was moving forward through the book, I realized this will be Catherine’s story. And I really didn’t know that. As I started out, I was just sort of presenting her in the different ways that she appeared to Lucy and her memory. And then I realized, oh, wow, of course, of course, of course. So yeah, Catherine was a force. She was really something and and I think that one of the things that I remembered from writing my name is Lucy Barton was only that he had gone out to the Midwest to get away from his meaty mother. And that’s all I needed to realize. Oh, okay. Okay. Oh, let’s play with this.

B&N: And Catherine is much more complicated ultimately than we think she is at first we meet her, and she’s a golfing matron of a certain age who likes to wear certain things and go on vacation in certain places. But she believes in love more than you might think someone like her would, but she’s not particularly good at expressing it.

ES: I know. I know what well, he does just come from Maine. And I can only say that because I come from Maine, so but there is even now in some parts of Montana, a little bit of a reticence about expressing his feelings. So, that’s something that we do have to remember that she was from me. And yet, as her story gets revealed, I hope the reader understands more about why there were these sort of hiccups in her life. And in her relationship with Liam, they hiccups, I mean, you know, little faces that we can’t quite figure out why they were there.

B&N: But that’s part of the beauty of this story is Lucy doesn’t know everything. William doesn’t know, everything. Catherine doesn’t know everything. And yet the three of them dance around each other as if they do.

ES: I know. Because that’s how we live, in my sense is that we all live thinking, Oh, I know this person, you know, and I know that person. She’s my mother-in-law. This is my husband, blah, blah, and so forth. And then time goes by and you realize, Wait, who, what? So it was fun to push those extremes.

B&N: I mean, I know you said William was intriguing to you. But I think from having read the book a couple of times, now, it feels like you really love William.

ES: I do. I love everybody I write about I did. I mean, I’m sorry, that sounds stupid. But I do I love them all.

B&N: Did any of the three of them surprise you?

ES: Yes. They surprised me a lot. William continued to surprise me, as I realized, you know, in his different conversations, that more and more would come out and be revealed about him. I thought, Oh, okay. I get it. That’s interesting. And Catherine, as I said, she she really surprised me as stuff unfolded. And I thought, wow, and look at these, as you said, these three people who thought that they all knew each other. And yet, what enormous spaces were between them all that time.

B&N: I have lots of notes in my galley. That’s a disconnect, disconnect, disconnect. And Lucy and William clearly loved each other at some point. And they have two daughters that they love. They were a genuine family.

ES: I know. I know.

B&N: But wow, the disconnects. And the disconnects are really significant. And at one point in the book, they go on a road trip together.

ES: They do. They do.

B&N: And in a couple of chapters, you reveal the fissures that were clearly there during their marriage that Lucy seems a little dismissive of, and then she’ll just drop a line and say, Well, you know, then I did this thing too. Well, you know, it wasn’t all and but William, you always apologize. And he said, Well, actually, I don’t.

ES: And she realizes, oh that’s true.

B&N: Is that the moment where they really understand that things are done, because there plenty of moments in the book, especially when they’re with their daughters. And William’s third marriage has now gone pear shaped to this guy is not good at being married, or was really not good.

ES: Right, he’s not.

B&N: Is it the road trip that reveals the fissures? Or is Lucy just finally getting to a point where she understands herself a little better?

ES: I think that the road trip opens this up for them, but they have had a relationship, you know, over the years ever since they split up and maintain, you know, a cordial relationship. And that’s why he’s telling her what he’s telling her about his nighttime issue at the very beginning of the book, because they’re not hostile to each other at this point. And they haven’t been for quite some time you get the feeling. I mean, they’re not great friends, but they’re connected still. And so when they end up taking this road trip, it brings back that connection even more, and the memories, of course, of how connected they really, once were all of this come swimming up more to the surface. But I think that they had a basis for this. Because she says, you know, this is when he apologizes, and she apologizes for things in their marriage. And she says to the reader, this may sound strange, but for us, it’s not. Every so often this happens over the years. And you realize, Oh, that’s interesting, you know, I mean, I thought that was interesting. So the road trip brings it a lot to the surface, but I think that there’s starting from a place of some connectedness anyway,

B&N: Lucy and William’s childhoods don’t exactly overlap, but they do have very specific mother figures. their moms are very intense characters. And yet here are Lucy and William trying to figure out what their lives mean and what their life together means. And it’s complicated, obviously, by their backgrounds, and William is fully unprepared for what he sees at Lucy’s home when when they talk about going to visit. Do you think William ever got over that?

ES: You know, it’s funny, I think, well, we don’t really quite know, because he’s William. So we never really quite know. Because I mean, as much as Lucy is her voice, William into silence. He has a variety of types of silence. And so I think that we never really know how he felt as they drove away from her childhood home many, many years ago, but I’m sure he was, you know, a gas. But let me just say something else about you, because you’re talking about they have very different mothers, but they have mother figures. One of the things that was very helpful to me when I realized, oh, he doesn’t ever call his mother Mom. He calls her Catherine. And I just thought, I don’t know exactly what that means. But it means something. And so to him, she has always been Catherine or Catherine Cole. And I just find it interesting, because you know, there are people I know, not that many, but some people do call their parents by their first name. And I’m just so intrigued by that. And obviously, his mother wanted to be called mom. And she said to Lucy, when they first got married, could you please call me mom? And she said, Well, I’ll try but she never could. Because William didn’t call her mom. And so that right there is something symbolic of Catherine’s inability to be a mother in a certain kind of way.

B&N: But Catherine, she swans around their lives, she takes them to fancy hotels on fancy vacations, and Lucy is really profoundly uncomfortable. She gives lots of clubs.

ES: No, Oh, my word. I know. Isn’t that the saddest thing? Well miss out in the world. But it’s a sad moment,

B&N: Between the coat that she gives loosely and then throws out.

ES: She loved that coat. She bought it for $5 in a thrift shop, she loved that coat and it’s gone.

B&N: Catherine’s not good with boundaries.

ES: No, no, she’s not forcing No.

B&N: But the flip side of that is Lucy’s mother who has giant walls, and no sense of how to reach out and how to connect. And this is something you write about across all of your books. But we’re really going to talk about the Lucy Bard, the three Lucy Barton books. My name is Lucy Barton. Oh, William and the story collection, anything is possible which came out. Let’s see Lucy Barton was 15, the story collection was 19. And William is now. If for some reason someone hasn’t read anything is possible yet. This is the story collection that said in M gash Illinois where Lucy’s from and it’s the people that you meet, as her mother is telling her stories in the hospital room in My Name is Lucy Barton. And it’s kind of great, because then you start to get more of the story and then you realize Lucy is not the best Narrator The most reliable narrator I should say. Her mother’s not the most reliable narrator and this carries over with Lucy in Oh, William, and yet I trust her.I ‘ll follow Lucy anyway. I know she’s a slightly unreliable. Yeah, she’s not malicious. She just gets the details.
ES: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

B&N: Can we talk about the structure for a second of these three books? Did you know that these other books were going to happen after Lucy Barton? How did Lucy Barton even come about?

ES: Well, Lucy Barton came about I honestly I think I just wrote, I can’t remember. I think I was like, it almost came out in a frenzy or something. And, and I attached it to my then editor, Susan Campbell. And I don’t I don’t I cannot remember why I did that. Because that’s why I never sent her anything before sending it to my agent and brawling. No, could have been an unconscious mistake that I attached. But somehow off that went, and Susan called me up and she just loved it. And she said, You must write this book and I don’t think I would have written it without her being so enchanted with it. And that was enormously important for me. And so I wrote that book. Like I said, it was really It almost felt like a little bit of a not a frenzy, but it was like, I felt like I was on a high wire and it was like okay, well, you know, this was gonna happen in half and a half. And then as I was writing it, and I was listening to her mother talking about all these people, I was thinking to myself, Well, what did happen to Kathy nicely, and I got so interested but I would like literally why friends the other part of my table and sit there and then write a few things about what happened to cast nicely. So in a way, I almost wrote anything’s possible at the same time that I was writing. My name is Lucy, but I mean, I was making scenes up on the other side of the table at the time that I was writing. My name is Lucy bye And then when I was done with that, I realized, oh, here we go, bum, bum, bum. All these different stories of all these different people have fun. And then a William, because like I said, with Laura Linney, it just seemed to blossom above her head. It was, you know, but I wasn’t thinking that I would ever write about William.

B&N: The women though. I mean, Lucy Barton’s Mother, you could argue leaves because she’s not present because Lucy’s not there. They don’t they don’t connect anymore until this five day period where mom comes to the hospital like was William has done for her, and made it possible for her to come. And then in anything possible, there are multiple stories where women leave for whatever reason.

ES: Exactly. And that’s when I realized, as I was listening to her mother in the hospital, I understood, oh, this mother stayed with a husband, who was obviously traumatized, from World War Two, and not easy to live with. But she stayed. And this is her mother’s story. I stayed, and therefore her mother can only talk about all these other women who left and what bad endings they all had. And so that was the whole point of Lucy’s mother’s story without her even knowing it.

B&N: And that’s the beauty of Lucy’s mom. Yeah. And she is honestly one of those characters. I mean, she she does some things where everyone raises an eyebrow, but she does the best she can with what she has, she does not have a lot.

ES: She does not have a lot at all. And then when Lucy finds out, or at least her siblings tell her that she was the favorite child. It just blows her away, because she didn’t know that there was a favorite one. But then you can almost sort of realize, Oh, I bet she was.

B&N: She was quiet. She stayed out of trouble. She got to college. She made it out of town.

ES: Yeah, yeah. But her poor mother, I agree. There’s a lot to feel for that mother. And her own limitations come quite naturally to me, because she was living a life that was very difficult.

B&N: But then Lucy leaves William, which at the time is also a radical decisions. There was a period in American history where divorce was actually controversial. You’re absolutely right.

ES: You’re exactly right. And especially the generation before when Kathy nicely was taking off. And Lucy’s Mother’s Day, you know, that was really quite a taboo, especially in a small town in Illinois at that time, postwar period. But even with Lucy to take that was not something that every woman did by any means.

B&N: But William has been left by at least two wives. Did you leave to or did he leave Joann?

ES: No, he left Joann.

B&N: Okay. He left Joann. But yeah, you know, Lucy left, and then his third wife leaves. Yeah, yeah. And Williams a little bewildered. When his wife leaves, he’s confused, he doesn’t understand

ES: He just doesn’t get it. And I think maybe that’s part of the reason that you liked him so much. He’s genuinely bewildered. And He’s genuinely baffled. He doesn’t really get it. And yet, he’s not a stupid man. And I don’t think he’s particularly mean me. And even though he says he sometimes does, but I mean, he’s just William. He’s just a little bit clueless, in certain ways. And yet, then he’s all of a sudden, not.

B&N: The punctuation in the title. Yeah. How did that come about?

ES: Well, because I thought that way, I just thought, Oh, William, and I just thought, right. Be surprised mark. And then as I was writing the book, I realized, look at all the permutations of the way that phrase is set. You know, it’s like, Oh, William, Oh, William, and I never had a different title for it. It was always going to be overly interesting. And then I realized, well, it works because there’s so many different wage that Oh, William, get said throughout the book.

B&N: Did you have the title from the start? Or did that come sort of

ES: Yeah, I had at the moment, I thought about Laura Benitez. Or, you know,

B&N: You talked about this briefly earlier, but I want to come back to it for a second because the first person narrative that you use with My Name is Lucy Barton, and Oh, William, it’s really intimate. It’s a little intense. It’s a little unreliable. You’ve also used the third person omniscient, with huge success in all of Kitteridge and all of again, and certainly possible. How do you make the shift? How do you How did you know you needed to write Lucy Barton’s stories in the first person?

ES: You know, I was really it was frightening for me because I’ve always thought of myself as somebody who writes in third person, because I can move around, can take the camera far away and drop it back down closer. I just felt like that was how I would write my stories. But I think that what happened is the Burgess boys has a prologue and nobody ever remembers it, which is fine. But the prologue was written in first person, and it was written by right not illusory, and obviously about not only the character, but the first person, just a few pages of a prologue by a writer talking with her mother about the Burgess boys. And I think that got me thinking, maybe I could do a first person. And then, like I said, it was Susan camel’s enthusiasm that gave me permission to go ahead to do it. And then when I made Lucy, a writer, that was even more frightening, partly because I think writers are, you know, not very interesting to read. But anyway, I just thought, well, you know, let’s go because she stays after school, and she reads all these books, and she realizes, you know, whatever. But I just, I just, once I made the decision, I just did it. And hope for the best.

B&N: It really, really works. Okay. As a reader, it really, really works.

ES: Thank you. Thank you.

B&N: Are you running for character first? Are you writing for language first? Or can you not separate the two?

ES: I’m so interested in people, I have been fascinated by people since I was just my first memory. I just think people are, for me, they are the most interesting things in the world. So I’m always writing first about a person and the language has to match that for me, I’ve trained myself for years to find a language that could match what I was trying to say. So at this point is almost one in the same but honestly, it’s always that a person who if they touched my heart in a certain way, then I realized, oh, okay, they’ll say if they don’t take my heart that way, then they get literally tossed on the floor.

B&N: I think especially in the story where Lucy goes back to her siblings, and M dash and anything is possible. It is incredibly clear there with her brother sort of trying to figure out who Lucy is 99 and rug and cleaning the house and all of these things. It it’s a terrific story. It’s it is one of the best stories I’ve ever read. But then Vicki, their sister comes in and wow, she is still mad. She is still.

ES: She’s great, isn’t she?

B&N: Fantastic! Wow, she’s mad. Wow.

ES: Of course. Yeah. I mean, you can see, and yet she does kind of staying at the end of that story is amazing. It’s just amazing that those three siblings have a relationship of love. I mean, that is love by the end of that story. They have all demonstrated love for each other. And for newseum special. I mean, I just thought it was astonishing as I found that out. But yeah, Pete Barton, it was interesting, because I could feel him kind of, like I’m a sideling up to me, and he wouldn’t sort of go away. And I realized, oh, okay, let’s find out here because it’s such a sweetheart, you know, and then back and my name is Lucy Barton, his mother says that he goes to sleep with the animals that are going to be slaughtered. And so that was, to me, an understanding of who he is. Poor Pete.

B&N: And the three siblings, they do share this language. They do know how to love each other, but they don’t know how to express it and Lucy brings that to her marriage with William. She doesn’t know how to explain who she is, or how She’s frightened or what the panic is. I mean, at one point, William would say, I’ve never known what to do with your panic while you’re panicking again. I can’t.

ES: I know. I know, which turns out to be a pretty funny scene. But nevermind. Great. They’d be away with that. But anyway, but Right. I mean, Lucy, you know, she’s, she’s just a kid when she leaves that house. And even though everything changes the moment, you know, she gets into that car to go to the college, that she’s still brings with her 17 or 18 years of, you know, a real trauma.

B&N: You have a new editor for oh, well, yeah.

ES: Andy ward. Yeah. And he’s the best. He’s just a wonderful man.

B&N: But he is a new editor. So what does that mean for you as a writer? What does that mean to your characters? What does that mean for the work? Because again, you don’t work in a linear fashion, you’d like to put notes together and create.

ES: Right, well, I never showed him or I never showed Susan, except for that personal business of My Name is Mr. Barton, right. I mean, when I tried a new book, I turn it in as one piece. And I have gone through it so many times that I practically haven’t memorized. And so by the time it gets there, both of them both and dances and have been unbelievably respectful, and they’re just so they’re just so gentle, in a similar way, they will just very gently suggest maybe, maybe just a tiny bit more here. Or maybe another beat here is what Susan would say. And he says it in a different way. But he’s been he was just as he was a terrific editor and, and just absolutely lovely and gentle in his suggestions, and I just couldn’t have been more grateful to him. So that was a really good thing.

B&N: You for years have talked about thinking about what a truthful sentence is. Yeah. Have you figured that out yet?

ES: You know, I think I think that I have figured out when I hear it, I know it. It’s not something I can explain. But it has to be truthful on every single level, I mean, has to be truthful within the story. It has to be truthfully, mostly, it just has to be a truthful sentence. And I have finally learned to recognize it when I hear it, but I can’t explain it.

B&N: So it’s not just factual. It’s so much like your books, even though they’re very thin. For the most part. They’re deceptively slim. They have big beating hearts. Yeah, I hope. Right. And it seems to me that you can’t separate truth from heart.

ES: That’s interesting. That’s very interesting. That’s a really, really good point. I have never thought of it that way. But you’re right. Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. That’s very interesting.

B&N: When Lucy is trying to explain William to herself, or the reader, whoever she’s trying, because she’s frequently trying to explain William does someone. She’s contradicting herself. She is looping back on things where you realize that wait, she’s just told this a couple of different ways. It’s kind of fascinating to watch her work through this mythology she has herself but also herself in the context of William.

ES: Right. Right. And the reason that she’ll repeat or repeat it in a different way is because she’s trying to get at the truth.

B&N: It’s almost like a kid processing language or story, the repetition, figuring out because, again, Lucy was not given a lot of tools emotionally.

ES: Oh, and this is why it’s so interesting. When William says, you know, he pulled the car over. And he said, Lucy, I’m married to because you were filled with joy. And when I wrote that, I thought, there we go. And who knows why she has no idea why she is filled with joy. But she, she was, and you can see her as a young person, so joyful at that college, just filled with joy. And why is she like that, and not her sister. And he’s just born that way. And yet, she still was born without the ability to figure out how to deal with people in a certain kind of way. Because that’s social learning. And she just really kind of didn’t have that. And yet, she did have joy. And I thought that was really interesting when I, when I realized I would write that William said that. But that explained her in a way that she didn’t even know.

B&N: It’s also a really William thing to say. It’s like, well, the most obvious thing in the world, why do you not see it, and then he gets a little snippy, because the other person doesn’t see the most obvious thing. And his entire family, his daughters, his ex wives, you know, as a mother, I’m sure even then we don’t really have Catherine say this, out there looking at him saying, Sorry, I don’t understand why you’re a pain.

ES: I know. I know why. Wow. Poor William.

B&N: There’s a quick mention of Lucy’s second husband, David, in a couple of different places in this book. Are we going to see David at some point?

ES: Well, that’s a good question. And I, I can’t, oh, boy, I would love to tell you all about that. But I’m not going to because it’s not good for me to talk about what I’m working on. So sorry. But right. But you know, we only see David a little bit because at the very beginning, she says, I need to talk about Williams. And then every so often, she said, But you know, but my husband David, you know, because she’s just lost him. And it’s so private. And she says at the very beginning, you know, grief is such a solitary thing. It’s like sliding down the outside of a long glass building all nobody can see you. And so we have that understanding that Lucy is like, she’s in that grief with David. And so she can almost not even talk about him, but she has to every so often because we just first out of her.

B&N: And that was also the first time she says in the novel that she really understood how it felt to be loved. And and it actually her relationship with David makes her question a bit her love and her relationship with her mother, which I know. She was absolutely convinced that she loved her mother and her mother loved her even though her mother, and then she has a much more openly loving relationship

ES: Really loving relationship. And then it makes her as she says a little constricted in her heart sometimes toward her mother. And also time has gone by and so she only has the memories of her mother and she can’t figure it out. But yeah, that’s a sad undertone to her happiness for David.

B&N: I’ll sit patiently while you work on whatever we’re not going to. This is your eighth book. I mean, this is the first time you haven’t really been able to tour we’re all in a virtual where you and I are a resume. I have a sneaking suspicion that you have lots of readers who mistake you for your characters. Not all of them but I There are probably some things You think there’s a little more Oliver a little more Lucy too. But have you learned anything from your readers over the years?

ES: You know, when I was on the road with my books, I love to meet my readers, because I could see in their eyes, it was the most interesting thing. You know, like in these lines, there would be people that would be very pleasant and enthusiastic and whatever. And then there was always somebody who had very quietly duck in and say, you know, please keep writing. And I’m like, Oh, you’re my ideal reader. So, yes, I have learned things from their questions and their responses. I can’t tell you specifically what it is. But I do understand every time I go to a new book, I realized, oh, right, that reader needed this, this reader needed that, because I think about my reader a lot. And I do have an ideal reader that I’m writing for. But when the real readers sort of come in, and help shape my understanding of what their needs are, it’s helpful to me as well.

B&N: Are you writing primarily for your readers? Are you writing more for the characters or for you?

ES: I’m writing for my readers, absolutely. In my way of thinking, I am writing for you. And I think of myself as being in a dance with the reader. You know, we’re dancing, and I have to take the lead. God forbid I would ever do that in real life. I didn’t even know how to dance. But the point is, in my mind, I’m thinking, Okay, we’re dancing. And we’re doing this together. And I am doing this for the reader with the hope that the reader will come with me, you know, for this little journey. And even if there are parts that don’t seem that pleasant, they’ll feel safe in my hands, and they will go and then when they come through the journey, they’ll see things just a little bit differently, and just momentarily, maybe a little transcendence will happen in their lives, those are made of in fear freely, might just be a little higher, just for a few minutes, they might recognize themselves, or they might recognize other people, but they will have somehow been a little bit changed and help. I hope. This is from one living mind to another as Thomas Carlyle used to say.

B&N: I think, too, it’s easy to forget that every reader brings their own backstory.

ES: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so it’s a different book for every reader, which is so interesting to me. And I think, especially the Lucy books, because they’re more porous. Yes. And there’s more room for the reader to bring your own story in. I mean, no matter what I write, every reader will bring their own story, which is how it should be. But there’s something about the way that Lucy is written that I do think of as porous, and therefore the reader will probably enter it more fully with their own stories.

B&N: You’ve talked about Alice Monroe, and William Trevor being major influences for you, right? And I can see it with Monroe and the revelatory moments as they build I mean, especially sort of in Oh, William, but if a new reader was coming to Monroe, or Trevor, do you have a recommendation for where to start? I mean, both of them have significant bodies of work. Trevor’s is

ES: Yeah, I know. Well, I think Trevor’s stories, I like his novels, as well, but I would go to his stories, because he just takes snapshots of ordinary people. I think the reason I’m drawn to both of them is because they’re just regular ordinary people. They’re not doing anything else. They’re just putting down a moment in somebody’s life. And you get to enter that life for a moment and realize, Oh, that was really interesting, or not, but you’re but it’s just ordinary people, which is what I’m writing about, you know, the people we pass on the street, these are the people that I’m interested in. And I think that his stories are just so well done. Like he can take one sentence and flip it over. And it’s unbelievable. Just shine. I mean, it’s just extraordinary that way.

B&N: We’ve covered a lot of ground with Oh, William, but we’re leaving out quite a big piece of the storyline, because that’s intentional, so people can discover it on their own. But what do you want readers to know about this new book?

ES: Well, I just hope that I hope to go through it with an open heart. And that would be my main hope, because there’s things that both characters do that might be frowned upon. But I’ve always said I’m not interested in good behavior or bad behavior. I’m interested in the murky, you know, the murky stuff that makes up our lives, but neither good nor bad. There’s just, you know, all that stuff inside us that can’t quite get him down. And so I’m interested in trying to bring that to the reader and sort of articulate some of that, the murkiness that I think many of us live with, no matter what our story is, and therefore, if they can come to Oh, William with an open heart, I hope they enjoy it. And also, I think it’s a real American story. I think it’s very much a story of America and the world war two and then the Vietnam War, the whole war thing is a little tremor that underlying, and then they’re this story, which is very, very American, it seems to me.

B&N: I would agree. I mean, you’re writing about class, you’re writing about poverty, you’re also writing about upward mobility. Yeah. Yeah. In ways that not a lot of writers do. You’re not judgmental at all about your characters. People make decisions in this book that are right for them.

ES: Yes, yeah. No, I never I know, one of the most freeing things for me about writing is that when I go to the page, I suspend all judgment on my characters. And it’s just so free. Because in real life, you know, we are judgmental, even if we try not to be, you know, Wolfington, or something, but when I go to the page, they’re just who they are. And my job is to record them as honestly as I can. And that’s a wonderful thing for me as a writer to be able to do that.

B&N: And you do that so well in Oh, William. And if people can come to the book with an open heart, as you said earlier, I think they are going to be absolutely delighted. And Lucy, Lucy doesn’t always get enough credit for being funny.

ES: I think you’re right, frankly, I mean, thank you, because I think that she’s quite funny. But then I just got it. I think maybe I don’t mean to make an inside joke. But I do think she’s funny. I can possibly people may read the Lucy book too quickly, because they’re very readable. And so they just read through it, you know, like eating a bowl of peanuts, they just shove it in their face, and then they’re done. But I think that if you slow down a little bit and relax into the pack, you know, you might, you might realize oh, yeah, that’s really funny.

B&N: You go back to Maine with Oh, William, for good chunk of the book. Yeah. Do you ever really leave Maine, even when you’re an AM, gosh, Illinois, even when you’re in New York City, I mean, Maine, Maine is its own character in a lot of ways for anyone who’s lived there. We know.

ES: It is its own character, it’s its own country, it’s a phone vein, main. And I guess it’s turned out to be a good thing that I was born and brought up there. But it is very much the same thing. And it was again, it was very free to put my name is Lucy Barton in the Midwest, and my husband and I went out there a number of times and drove around and around and around. And we went to the graveyard to get the names. And we really, you know, we had ourselves a great time. And that was freeing to get out of Maine and to have the Midwest landscape. That was a helpful thing. But I obviously have to just keep coming back to Maine. Apparently keep writing about mothers.

B&N: I think readers are okay with both of those things to be perfectly honest. I can’t be the only reader who’s excited about things when I see your byline. Elizabeth Strout. Thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. The new novel is Oh, William and is out now.

ES: It’s such a pleasure to have spoken with you. Thank you so much for having me.