On New Year’s Eve I had a nook of time, so I took it to
finish the novel I had started reading earlier in the week: Elizabeth Strout’s
My Name is Lucy Barton. I had enjoyed
her previous book: Olive Kitteridge. I had found a familiarity with that
book. Elizabeth Strout grew up in Maine
and so did I. While reading Olive
Kitteridge I could picture the faces of the characters, I knew the settings, I
could smell the ocean… I could envision the roads they drove on, the houses
they lived in, the doctor’s offices, the shops, the places they went, the way
the protagonists moved through their surroundings and their lives. It was all so familiar, so real, such a part
of my Maine upbringing and fabric. So there
was a certain comfort zone when I picked up My Name is Lucy Barton, a sense
that we had a common ground. At least
three “notably avid readers” in The New York Times’ “The Year in Reading” Book
Review recommended the book as one of their favorites of the year. I was intrigued, I was compelled and I was
looking for a book that could keep my interest all the way through. It seemed the books I had picked up as of
late couldn’t keep my attention. (There
are at least 8 novels and memoirs by my bedside ½ or ¼ read.) I saw it on the shelf in the bookstore during
my week of Christmas shopping, and I instantly grabbed it.
In one of the reviews someone had mentioned crying when they
reached a certain page in the book. For me, it was page 164. It is not a long
novel, 209 pages and can be read in an afternoon. Some chapters are a succinct
paragraph. I zipped through it, totally
engrossed …flipping the pages in a flurry until the end. Her relationship/ bond
with her mother is such a strong one, not unlike my own. Her mother is a force
in her life, but she is not a woman who hugs, or tells her she loves her, or
comforts her in that way. I don’t know
if it is a generational thing (maybe it is just a mother/ daughter thing), but
my mother and my relationship with my mother (and my father too) is like hers in
a way that it pulled at my heart strings and had me weeping on page 164. It
rang so true. It is a relationship hard to define, hard to describe, but Elizabeth
Strout seems to capture it. I too spent 8 weeks in a hospital bed (waiting for
my son to be born), and my mother flew out to visit me and sat with me on two
separate occasions during that time. Not
sure I will write a novel about that time, but it had me reflecting,
remembering and understanding that relationships with our mothers are complex… and
as Lucy Barton says, they are ok.
I am Lucy Barton made me recall and reflect on moments in my
childhood…moments in my neighborhood with my childhood friends, moments with my
brothers and my parents that were hiding in a deep chasm in my memory, in my
heart. This book also touches on how we
treat others, how not to judge people, and the various relationships we have
with our doctors, colleagues, people we look up to for mentoring, friends, our
husbands and our kids. But it was the
complex mother/ daughter relationship/ bond that really struck me. I loved this book, the way it rocked me.
