This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly.
Unintentionally, I have read two novels in a row that have to do with imperfect mothering told from the perspectives of women who have been imperfectly parented and who in turn recognize their own shortcomings. In The Language of Flowers the narrator was quite young, an orphan, and dealing in real time with the daily ramifications of imperfect parenting. In My Name is Lucy Barton, the narrator is older, reflecting on her past and trying to make sense of it. This novel is about more than the mother/daughter relationship though; My Name is Lucy Barton is also about being a writer and the process of writing one’s story.
Lucy Barton narrates her story in an intimate, confessional way. The story is not told in linear fashion. There is a lot of skipping around, similar to the rhythms of a conversation where one might get sidetracked or go off topic while relating some story. For Lucy, now a middle aged woman with grown daughters, the jumping off point for her story is the time when she, a young mother in New York City in the 1980s, became ill and was hospitalized for nine weeks. During this illness her mother, from whom Lucy has been estranged for most of her adult life, comes to visit and stays with Lucy in the hospital for 5 days. From this event, the reader is taken to Lucy’s childhood in the Midwest where she grew up poor in a dysfunctional family. Lucy remembers always being alone and lonely, hungry, cold and sometimes locked up in a truck while her parents worked. She remembers that at school, in church and the community at large, she and her family were ostracized. At school, however, Lucy had access to books and warmth. She took advantage of both, excelled at school and, unlike her brother and sister, left home for college, never looking back.
As an adult, Lucy still feels like an outsider. Her lack of social standing and cultural awareness (having never had a television) set her apart at times even in college, but she met and married a young man both sympathetic to and understanding of her roots. Lucy and William move east, have two children and make their home in New York. Lucy pursues her career as a writer, getting some of her work published. Yet her family in the Midwest are uninterested and make no attempt to contact Lucy until her illness. To pass the time, Lucy’s mother tells her stories about the people from their hometown and “where they are now.” For the most part, these people now are suffering in some form or another — marriages over, mental illness, etc. While Lucy is interested, she also notes some important details. First, her mother, in telling these stories of other people’s trauma, never addresses the trauma within their own family. Second, her mother cannot say the words “I love you” to Lucy.
Lucy’s estrangement from her family and her ability to write, her success as a writer, are linked in a couple of important ways for Lucy. Firstly, when she felt lonely as a child, books made her feel less alone. Lucy’s desire to become a writer is rooted in this comfort. As an adult, writing has given Lucy a way to be seen, heard and understood as she was not in childhood. Secondly, Lucy understands as an adult, looking back, that in order to write, she had to remove herself from her family. She had to isolate herself from them. A neighbor in New York once told Lucy that to be a writer requires that she become “ruthless.” It seemed strange to Lucy at first but makes sense to her as she writes now.
The life of a writer is, I imagine, a solitary kind of life, at least when one is in the throes of writing. The one other writer in the novel, Sarah Payne, is a mentor of sorts to Lucy, and she, too, seems to have some kind of trauma or pain in her past. Sarah is a successful novelist and supportive of Lucy, but on the occasions when Lucy encounters her, Sarah seems distracted, self-deprecating, and even unwell. Illness is front and center in this novel: Lucy’s hospitalization (for an illness that doctor’s cannot explain and struggle to heal), Sarah’s fatigue and dizziness, the AIDS epidemic, and post-traumatic stress disorder — all serve to mark people as different, frightening and to be judged and avoided. Yet it is from this solitude and ostracism that Sarah and Lucy fight against such judgment. Sarah’s advice to her students, which echos the advice of a teacher from Lucy’s past, is not to judge others, that no one is better than anyone else. Lucy takes this advice to heart. She understands how she has been judged in life, how she has been seen by others, and so she does not judge her family. She ends this story with what I imagine writers everywhere saying: “All life amazes me.”
This novel is a quick read, but also deeply thought provoking. There’s much fodder for group discussion here: family relationships, the past, trauma, marginalizing the poor and sick, what it means to be a writer, just to name a few topics. I’ll be adding Elizabeth Strout’s other novels to my TBR list.