She wiggled her fingers, and I knew that there was too much emotion for us, so I waved back and lay flat. I could not figure out why she looked so different. I had not seen my mother for years, and I kept staring at her. She leaned forward and squeezed my foot through the sheet. About three weeks after I was admitted, I turned my eyes from the window late one afternoon and found my mother sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed. Whenever a nurse came to took my temperature, I tried to get her to stay for a few minutes. I'd like to start with a short reading from "My Name is Lucy Barton." And at this point, Lucy is in the hospital, feeling very lonely.ĮLIZABETH STROUT: (Reading) Had anyone known the extent of my loneliness, I would have been embarrassed. Like the characters of Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, Strout grew up in a small town in Maine.
In review of the novel, in the New York Times Sunday book review, Claire Messud describes Strout as articulating the Gordian knot of family, binding together fear and misery, solace and love. Lucy grew up poor and was not treated well by her parents, but her mother's presence in the hospital is profoundly comforting. Lucy is lonely and isolated in the hospital, and is shocked to wake one day and find her estranged mother sitting beside her.
She's in the hospital for several weeks recovering from an infection that set in after an appendectomy. Strout has just published a new novel called "My Name Is Lucy Barton." When the novel opens, Lucy is an aspiring writer who is a wife and mother of two young children.
Robert Redford is now adapting Strout's 2013 novel "The Burgess Boys" into an HBO miniseries. Family histories of depression and suicide haunt the stories. Set in a small coastal town in Maine, the stories focus on an older woman who perceives herself as a no-nonsense truth teller, but constantly humiliates her husband and criticizes her son in ways that makes him feel worthless. My guest, Elizabeth Strout, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 for her collection of short stories, "Olive Kitteridge." The book was adapted into an HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand as Olive.
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