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“I walked around and around the house. I did not know where to put my mind.��

March 2020, Maine, USA
Lucy is by the sea in a big, older house that her ex-husband William has rented to whisk her away to escape the ravages of the coronavirus in New York City. I use the overworked phrase “whisk her away�� because that is what it feels like.

He tells her to pack a bag, they are to leave immediately, and then he sweeps her out of her apartment, her home for the last many years that she shared with her adored late husband, David.

She and William, once married for twenty years, have two adult daughters whom William has already told of his plans. He advised them and their husbands to do the same, get out of the city.

�� ‘And don’t tell your mother yet, but please do this. I will deal with her.�� And so they hadn’t told me. Which is interesting because I feel that I am close to our girls, I would have said closer to them than William is.��

Lucy agrees to go. In the first few pages she says:

“Here is what I did not know that morning in March: I did not know that I would never see my apartment again. I did not know that one of my friends and a family member would die of this virus. I did not know that my relationship with my daughters would change in ways I could never have anticipated. I did not know that my entire life would become something new.��

She has said previously that William is the one who introduced her to the world (from her extremely poor background), and he has always made her feel safe. This is how she opens the book.

“Like many others, I did not see it coming.

But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean.��

She had also accompanied him on a trip to Maine to follow up an ancestry search William had done about his mother, whom Lucy knew.

Lucy’s own horrific childhood was the subject of My Name Is Lucy Barton, with more family stories in Anything Is Possible. The story of the trip to Maine is told in Oh William!

You don’t need to have read these, but this will be more meaningful if you do. William is still bossy and irritating, while Lucy stays outwardly calm. Outwardly.

“Sometimes I would have to leave the house in the dark and walk down by the water, swearing out loud.��

When she feels overwhelmed, as I imagine we all have, she appeals in her mind to her ‘mother��, not her real, abusive, late mother.

�� ‘M�dz�,�� I cried inside myself to the nice mother I had made up, ‘Mom, I can’t do this��! And the nice mother I had made up said, You are really doing so well, honey. ‘But, Mom, I hate this!�� And she said, I know, honey. Just hang in there and it will end.

But it did not seem like it would end.��

[Note �� Strout uses italics, but I added the single quotation marks around Lucy’s own internal speech because not all reviews recognise html formatting. Remarks from Lucy’s invented mother are not italicised in the original.]

Lucy notes the growing division in America, the masked and the unmasked, the protests and the police. This suggestion of civil war worries her. Waiting in the car in Maine while William is in a shop, she looks at the police cruiser parked next to them.

“I watched him so carefully.

So carefully I watched him.

I wondered, What is it like to be a policeman, especially now, these days? What is it like to be you?
. . .
In a way that is not uncommon for me as a writer, I sort of began to feel what it was like to be inside his skin. It sounds very strange, but it is almost as though I could feel my molecules go into him and his come into me.��

Lucy is speaking about molecules, of course, but it could just as well be Strout, I think, who so deftly puts us into Lucy’s mind. Seeing the Capitol riots on TV, Lucy remembers being humiliated and bullied in her childhood because she was dirty and smelly. She wonders, if this had continued all her life, what might have become of her?

“I suddenly felt that I saw what these people were feeling; they were like my sister, Vicky, and I understood them. They had been made to feel poorly about themselves, they were looked at with disdain, and they could no longer stand it.��

It’s no wonder that Lucy is an acclaimed writer. She understands people better than most and has genuine concern for them.

“Who knows why people are different? We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world takes its swings at us.��

Thanks to Pulitzer Prize-winner, Elizabeth Strout, we see how Lucy deals with the swings. I should add that it was nice to see Bob Burgess (from The Burgess Boys become good friends with Lucy and William. Other characters from other books get a mention, too.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the preview copy from which I have quoted, so quotations may have changed.

My review of My Name Is Lucy Barton

My review of Anything is Possible

My review of Oh, William!

Lisa Allardice has a wonderful interview with Elizabeth Strout in The Guardian, which discusses Strout's life and her work, especially this book.