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“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.��

I read this.. . and then I had to read it again. It is just so full. Lucy is a tender, lost soul who was battered by circumstance but is now finding her story.

Lucy, a writer, weaves her story back and forth between today and her wretched childhood. During her early marriage, she spent nine weeks in hospital, mysteriously feverish after an appendectomy.

Her mother, who used to beat her and whom she hadn’t seen in years, appeared suddenly in a chair by Lucy’s hospital bed and remained there for five days. She refused the offer of a bed. She was a shadowy figure, almost as if Lucy had conjured her up. Her mother mostly recited old gossip, with Lucy finishing some of the familiar sentences.

But then, a revelation. She heard her mother “suddenly speak of her childhood, how she had taken catnaps throughout her childhood too. ‘You learn to, when you don’t feel safe,�� she said. ‘You can always take a catnap sitting up.��"

Lucy, on the other hand, slept through the night for the first time as soon as her mother was there.

“Her being there, using my pet name, which I had not heard in ages, made me feel warm and liquid-filled, as though all my tension had been a solid thing and now was not.��

It is often said that abused children will choose to stay with an abusive mother rather than leave home. Better the devil you know?

Lucy had escaped her unspeakable childhood in rural Amgash, Illinois, loving books and learning, which led her to New York, but unwelcome memories intrude:

“The truck. At times it comes to me with a clarity I find astonishing. The dirt-streaked windows, the tilt of the windshield, the grime on the dashboard, the smell of diesel gas and rotting apples, and dogs. I don’t know, in numbers, how many times I was locked in the truck.��

and

��. . . in my youth there were times that I wanted desperately to run to a stranger when we went into town and say, ‘You need to help me, please, please, can you please get me out of there, bad things are going on—��And yet I never did, of course; instinctively I knew that no stranger would help, no stranger would dare to, and that in the end such a betrayal would make things far worse.��

Dirt-poor, cold, neglected, beaten, and shunned at school for being dirty and stinky, Lucy had only one friend - a tree.

“In the middle of the cornfields stood one tree, and its starkness was striking. For many years I thought that tree was my friend; it was my friend.��

This touching uncertainty��“I thought it was my friend; it was my friend��—crops up many times, as if Lucy hasn’t enough confidence to make a simple declarative statement. Saying her doctor apparently understood her loneliness, she says, “This is what I want to think. This is what I think.��

She was so unsure and starved for affection as a child that she consumed any crumb of attention, declaring her love for people who have shown her simple kindness—the doctor, a professor, an artist.

She was nobody. She was ignorant of the world and didn’t know who she was.

Now she does, and she says in unqualified declarative statements: “This one is my story. This one. And my name is Lucy Barton.��

Many thanks to NetGalley, Random House and Penguin for an advanced copy to review.

P.S. There is a New Yorker interview with the author about how and why she later wrote Anything Is Possible, the book of short stories that follow these characters. I reviewed it here, if you're interested:
/review/show...

The interview is here: