My Name Is Lucy Barton is a literary fiction book by author Elizabeth Strout.
A silent, transcendent contemporary novel about love, longing, and resilience in a traumatized family beyond words.
A simple hospital visit becomes the gateway to the tender mother-daughter relationship in this extraordinary novel.
This is one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book.

Lucy Barton is slowly recovering from a simple surgery. Her mother, whom she had not spoken to in years, came to see her. People from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seem to have reconnected them, but just beneath the surface is a tension and longing that has affected every aspect of Lucy’s life: escaping from Her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters.

This is the story of Lucy Barton, who grew up in great poverty and suffered her parents’ neglect and abuse in the farmlands of Illinois and went on to became a successful fiction writer in New York City. Both poignant and profound on many different levels, Lucy Barton’s tale about herself is also a tale of many people in her life and an exploration of the human condition from the kindness of strangers to our basest need to find ways to feel superior to others by putting them down (in this book, based primarily on social status (poor) and regional distinctions (Southern, read “trash”), about how the pain we experience as children, from a parent’s neglect or our parents’ divorce, can be so sharp and our longings from childhood so substantial that we live with it every day “with each seizure of the beating heart.”

This is a story about how some humans cannot face the harm we have done and so we lash out at all around us with unfair, ignorant judgments to make ourselves feel superior or we erect immature walls of silence (like closing our eyes and pretending to nap) to protect ourselves from acknowledging our faults and responsibilities. It’s a story showing how some of us can never communicate our feelings of love and forgiveness and are incapable of offering even small measures of redemption.

It’s a story of Lucy Barton’s father “who was tortured every day of his life for things he did during the war,” and of her mother as a “wife who stayed with him because most did during those days and she comes to her daughter’s hospital room and talks compulsively about everyone’s marriage going bad and she doesn’t even know that’s what she’s doing. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter imperfectly.”

• My Name Is Lucy Barton

• A Novel
• By: Elizabeth Strout

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