“I have no memory,” Lucy recalls, “of my mother ever touching any of her children except in violence.” Her father, a World War II veteran with uncontrollable sexual urges, used to walk around the house masturbating and, during sex with his wife, emit “horrifying, appalling high-pitched sounds.” As for her siblings, “we were equally friendless and equally scorned, and we eyed each other with the same suspicion with which we eyed the rest of the world.”Ĭompared with her brother, who lives alone in the isolated house they grew up in and still reads children’s books, Lucy appears to have escaped her damaged childhood through the vocation of writing. Lucy can remember foraging for food in garbage cans with a cousin outside her small hometown of Amgash, Illinois, and those memories still have the power to wound in Strout’s new novel, Oh William!, in which a considerably older Lucy thinks of children on the school playground pinching their noses and saying, “Your family stinks.” Material squalor was matched by cultural deprivation (no books, magazines, or TV) and emotional starvation. Lucy comes from nothing.” It was true, if a bit indelicate.
Speaking to one of the guests, Catherine said, “This is Lucy. At one point in Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, the narrator, a successful writer living in Manhattan, recalls the time she was introduced at her wedding reception by her elegant mother-in-law, Catherine.
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