My Name Is Lucy Barton – Elizabeth Strout’s Novel about A Woman Who (apparently) Comes From Nothing

I read Olive Kitteredge, Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, every spring.  I use it to teach my graduate students how personality works – and how it changes.  Each chapter in Olive Kitteredge mentions Olive, but that is all that some of them do.  Each chapter is, essentially, a short story and many have as their focus people other than Olive – but they are all people who are related to her and most all of them live in the small seaside town in Maine that she inhabits.  Across the course of the novel, my students come to love Olive – a woman who is very difficult to live with.  She is blunt to the point of being acerbic.  She fends off attempts that others make to connect with her and to love her.  She is dour and has a jaded view of life and, despite loving her son deeply, she has abused him.  And yet, across the arc of the novel, which travels through decades as well as multiple people’s lives, she evolves in ways that are believable and feel true.  She becomes more aware of her love for life and for people.  And we – my students and me – root for her and struggle to understand the potential for and the limits to change that her personality imposes – while also trying to get a handle on many of the other characters in the book from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

I learned today in a New York Times article about Diane Arbus, that Frank O’Connor, in his book about the short story, “The Lonely Voice,” characterized novels as being about the ways that people fit into society, but he maintained that short stories are about loners: People who don’t fit in – people who are essentially misfits.  In that sense, Olive Kitteredge, as a novel length collection of short stories that are strung together, tells us about many misfits.  It also helps us understand how a battle-ax like Olive can be both a loner – a misfit, one who rejects the world, and, as the object of a novel, if not a person who fits in, one who grows to be slightly more open to the possibility that society might have something to offer her.

My Name Is Lucy Barton introduces us, in a novella, to another woman from the margins of society.  Her mother-in-law characterizes her as having “come from nothing.”  And we learn, in bits and pieces, and never completely, just where it is that she comes from as she writes a memoir about being ill of some unknown infection after a routine appendix operation and having her mother come to stay for a week of her five week hospital stay in the mid-1980s.  Lucy has married, has two young children, lives in New York City, has published a couple of things in literary magazines, and her mother travels from her rural hometown of Amgash, Illinois to stand vigil with her in her hospital room that has a view of the Chrysler building and to tell her stories about Amgash and to jog her memories about her origins.

Lucy Barton is a woman – a writer – who is lonely.  She says, “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.”   She meets another writer, Sarah Payne, in a clothing store in New York.  She discovers Payne is a writer when she asks for fashion advice, and then goes to a writing workshop Payne teaches.  After Sarah is harshly judged by a psychoanalyst who is a student in the workshop, Sarah teaches Lucy, and the rest of the class, to come to the page without judgement.  And this is what Elizabeth Strout does so well.  I use Olive Kitteredge to teach because the characters in the novel are the people that clinical psychologists will work with.  Some are out and out crazy, and most are deeply disturbed; sorrowful or anxious, they can be diagnosed and packaged and we can come up with a treatment plan for them – or we can do what Strout does – we can appreciate them and their lives and the difficulties they face and the ways in which society has not provided an answer for them.  We can appreciate them rather than pity them – be kind and generous and connect with them – to link them to ourselves and to the people around them – to figure out how to love them by, as Payne urges us, coming to them without judgement.

Lucy Barton’s mother, when she talks to her in the hospital, tells her stories.  She tells her stories about the people in Amgash.  They are not generous stories.  They are gossipy stories.  They lack important details but they also convey something very important about the person being gossiped about.  And they serve Lucy well.  They – along with her mother’s reports of her dreams – dreams that foretell the future and contain nothing bad about Lucy so her mother knows that Lucy will recover from this illness – the stories and the dreams are the thread that connect Lucy to her mother.  It is a thin thread – there is mostly silence, especially around the issues that are most important between them, but it is a thread that is sufficient, apparently, to sustain Lucy to connect – or reconnect – this lonely person to her mother and, beyond that, to the world.

Sarah Payne, the writer, teaches Lucy how to love her characters.  She tells her, “Never ever defend your work.  This is a story about love, you know that… This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter.  Imperfectly.  Because we all love imperfectly.  But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.”  And we hear in this – at the center of this odd, dreamlike story about a mother who dreams about her daughter, and doesn’t understand her; a mother who has had next to nothing and has exposed her daughter to the cold, to loneliness, and to ridicule – that we need to hear these things and to know that they don’t negate the power of that very slender thread that connects them.

Anna Ornstein, a psychoanalyst who as a young girl survived both the work camp depicted in Schindler’s List and Auschwitz, noted that she survived them through luck, but also because she was with her family.  Others who survived the camps were in family groups – and if their family was not with them, they created family-like groups with a few of the people who surrounded them.  Obviously, millions of people in family groups died – she made it clear that she was not blaming those who died for being disconnected, but she noted that when someone became disconnected – or came to the camp disconnected and did not make connections, they died very quickly.

Lucy got out of Amgash.  She liked books and she liked to study – the library and the school were warm and provided respite from her home.  Neither her brother nor her sister took to school, and they stayed in and near Amgash.  Lucy left Amgash, but she had the ability to do that in part because, in spite of all the poverty and abuse, there was a connection with her mother – there was love.  And the realities of the situation did not negate that love, but were the context in which it occurred.

To see things as they are – to avoid whitewashing them – but also to avoid judging them harshly – to report them – to be curious about them – this is the (ideal) analytic attitude that Strout exemplifies, in both Olive Kitteredge and in My Name Is Lucy Barton.  Obviously, as her example with the psychoanalyst in Sarah Payne’s class exemplifies, we can (and do) misuse our ability to observe.  We connect things in order to judge, to distance, to be snide and be better than.  But, at our best, we use our ability to see and hear and piece things together to connect with each other.

This process comes with a cost.  When Sarah Payne teaches, Lucy can see the energy draining from her.  Connecting with others directly and clearly – being level headed and calling things as we see them – it takes effort – sometimes tremendous effort.  Especially when we work from the position of loneliness, when we work from inside the disconnected aspects of the people that we are connecting with, rather than offering platitudes or simply telling them to buck up or providing whitewash about the virtues of connection (something that I fear I sometimes do in these posts – including this one - and in the rest of my life), we can become depleted.  Because connecting from that place of disconnection – of loneliness – of being the oddball, the weirdo, the object of ridicule, goes against the grain of who we, in some very deep sense, want to be.  And yet it is the only path out of loneliness.  There is a bleak kind of beauty to connecting through our loneliness, one that Strout beautifully portrays in this book.

I went to a presentation this week at my local institute.  It was a presentation about Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist who wrote about Hollywood stars during the 40s, 50s, and 60s.  Hopper, portrayed realistically and harshly in the recent film Trumbo, dished dirt and 36 million readers weekly lapped it up.  They wrote her letters, and the presenter had been to the archives and had read them and brought copies of them to the presentation.  Some of the letter writers were clearly disturbed – writing in less and less organized ways about this tramp and that tramp in Hollywood.  And Hedda answered some of the letters personally, but fed her readers information on a regular basis.  And it led me to wonder whether she served an important function in an increasingly large and impersonal society – one in which the threads of gossip that a small town of Amgash provided – threads that could wound, but that could also bind, were being lost as we moved into our lonely lives of watching others live, first on the movie screen and then on our Television sets; it led me to wonder whether Hedda served a function similar to the one that Lucy’s mother served (and Sarah Payne – and Lucy as author – more importantly - Strout serves and even, ironically, that the movies and TV shows themselves serve), creating a narrative – a story – one where we come to know and care about the characters and have a sense of how they work, and therefore have a sense of how we fit with them – so that we feel somewhat less lonely and isolated – we belong to a community, one that our story tellers create for us.

This is a challenging business.  The business of telling stories and doing it in a fashion that respects the people we are talking about (Hedda Hopper respected her readers, I think, more than her subjects – something that led her readers to feel connected to her – rather than to each other and to the stars – or to the stars as objects of disdain rather than veneration or concern).  I think it is easier, in some ways, to craft a connection – whether it is Strout’s (and Payne’s and Lucy’s) connection of respect or Hopper’s and the analyst in the story’s snide connection – when writing than verbally and in person.  Perhaps that is why I post so frequently – I can control the medium more fully (or think I can).  I just received evaluations of the class I referenced.  While the students appreciated Olive Kitteredge, I clearly miscommunicated some important information in the class more generally.  One of my experiments in teaching went wildly awry.  Similarly, experiments in communicating with my patients can go wildly awry.  I will be seeing many of the students in the fall, and we can address some of the issues in their feedback and perhaps resolve them; I almost always see my patients again, and we frequently work to rework and better understand what we each have been trying to communicate.  This business of not being alone, of not being isolated, is challenging business indeed.      

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