What Strout is trying to get at here - how the past is never truly past, the lasting effects of trauma, and the importance of trying to understand other people despite their essential mystery and unknowability - is neither as straightforward nor as simple as at first appears. "Because I am a novelist," Lucy explains in Oh William!, "I have to write this almost like a novel, but it is true - as true as I can make it." Lucy's determination to tell her personal story honestly and without embellishment evokes Hemingway, but also highlights fiction's special access to emotional truths.Ī memoir, fictional or otherwise, is only as interesting as its central character, and Lucy Barton could easily hold our attention through many more books. Like My Name is Lucy Barton, Oh William! is a novel-cum-fictional memoir, a form that beautifully showcases this character's tremendous heart and limpid voice.
It is like sliding down the outside of a really long glass building while nobody sees you."īook Reviews In 'Olive, Again,' Elizabeth Strout Revisits An Old Friend Grief is such a - oh, such a solitary thing this is the terror of it, I think. She tells us that in her grief for David "I have felt grief for William as well. Seven years her senior, he is also experiencing unhappy changes in his life (which I'll leave for the reader to discover), and calls on Lucy to help navigate them. But against all odds they have remained friendly. She'd left William, a parasitologist who has never let the women in his life get too close, after nearly 20 years of marriage.
She finds some welcome distraction in revisiting her relationship with her first husband, William Gerhardt, the philandering father of her two grown daughters. In Oh William! Lucy, now 64, is mourning the death of her beloved second husband, a cellist named David Abramson. Elizabeth Strout's latest, her eighth book, had me at the first line: "I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William." The forthright, plainspoken speaker is Lucy Barton, who we came to love in My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and Anything is Possible (2017), where we learned how she overcame a traumatic, impoverished childhood in Amgash, Illinois, to become a successful writer living in New York City.
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