"My Name is Lucy Barton"

[fiefoe]

This is a short and plain book, with a lot of things left unsaid. Elizabeth Strout captures well the comtemplative mood of an invalid, as well as the anything-but-dead-air conversation between a parent and a child who are not in the habit of sharing much.

• It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.
• “You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
• But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.
• I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that's what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.
• My more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, “Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!”
• This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.
• There is that constant judgment in this world: How are we going to make sure we do not feel inferior to another?
• (In sculpture garden of NY Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lucy read placard and "the children are offering themselves as food to their father. He is being starved to death in prison and these children only want one thing: to have their father’s distress disappear, they would allow him to eat them. And Lucy thought, 'pity us all, we don’t mean to be so small.')
• I think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless to be a writer... But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.