In fact, Strout writes about Lucy Barton’s interior life so well that some people can’t believe she isn’t mining a rich autobiographical seam to which she has yet to confess. “No one writes interior life like Strout does,” they said. “Reading is a celebration of the mystery of ourselves,” she likes to say, something the Booker judges also feel. And imagining is part way to understanding, which is what she hopes happens when people read her books – understanding others and themselves.

Oh, how we laughed, wryly, over Zoom.īut that’s the thing about Strout’s work: she makes it so easy for readers to imagine that they’ve stepped into someone else’s world, especially here when she is writing about something we have all lived through. “And then this happened: Toward the end of June, Becka got the virus,” writes Strout about Lucy’s daughter.Īnd then this happened: I test positive barely an hour after reading that and two hours before I was due to meet Strout, who is in London ahead of the Booker announcement. She was surprised her publisher pushed it out so soon but I wasn’t: there’s nothing like experiencing the subject matter of a novel in real time, which is what happened when I re-read Lucy by the Sea. “I think of it as a novel about this group of people and how they keep reconnecting and transforming themselves. Elizabeth Strout in Maine (Photo: Tristan Spinski for The Washington Post via Getty)įor although Lucy moves to the coast to escape the virus raging in Manhattan, Strout insists Lucy by the Sea is not a pandemic novel.

“They were still so fresh in my mind that when the world changed, I thought, ‘Let’s see what happens to them if we stick them in a house on the cliff on the coast of Maine.’” She almost gave Oh William! an epilogue but is glad she didn’t given how long the pandemic raged – not to mention the potential it afforded for dissecting complex family situations. She couldn’t resist seeing how the pair, who have two adult daughters, would react to such a seismic event. Strout, who splits her time between Manhattan and Maine, had just finished Oh William!, which delved into Lucy’s friendship with her ex-husband, William, when the pandemic struck. That novel used a visit by Lucy’s estranged mother when Lucy was sick in hospital in New York to dissect their troubled relationship. For anyone yet to dip into Strout’s universe, the American author shot to literary fame with her Pulitzer-winning collection of interlinked short stories, Olive Kitteridge, about an irascible woman living in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine, before publishing My Name is Lucy Barton in 2016.

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