“New York City, in literature and life, tends to find a place for everyone—even those of us who arrive wearing the wrong clothes, missing the irony, at sea amid allusions to prep schools and psychotherapists and summer houses. Social class, that most discomfiting subject for Americans, is at the heart of Elizabeth Strout’s potent new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton (Random House), which tells the story of a woman so strikingly different in temperament from Strout’s most famous creation to date—Olive Kitteridge, who made an HBO-Pulitzer juggernaut out of wit and irascibility—she seems to have almost been created in her relief.”
WGBHForum: Elizabeth Strout discusses My Name is Lucy Barton
In My Name Is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout shows how a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all-the one between mother and daughter. She discussed her work-and the process of writing-with author Brock Clarke at The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA.
Elizabeth Strout discusses "My Name is Lucy Barton"
WGBHForum
January 14, 2016NY Times: Elizabeth Strout on ‘Lucy Barton’
“Don’t make the mistake of blurring the line between fiction and truth, a novelist named Sarah Payne warns in Elizabeth Strout’s latest book, “My Name Is Lucy Barton.”
. . . She’s speaking to her own fictional audience, and possibly to us, too. But who knows which voice reflects whose view in the deceptively simple but many-layered world of “Lucy Barton”? ”
WSJ: This Is a Story About Love
“Ms. Strout’s allies herself less with recent autobiographical fictions than with Ernest Hemingway…. His influence is present here in her combination of candor and indirection and in the economy and simplicity of the language that conveys a sense of childlike vulnerability.”
SF Chronicle: Complex, emotionally persuasive
“‘My Name Is Lucy Barton’ — like all of Strout’s fiction — is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it.”