By Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker, January 20, 2020
On the subject of his vocation, Philip Roth liked to quote Czeslaw Milosz: “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished.” It’s a great aphorism, pithy and cavalier, as emphatic as a gunshot. To write is to declare a loyalty that runs deeper than blood, to make a pledge to the self and its expression; to write well is to tell the truth about what you have seen, starting with where—and who—you come from. That, anyway, is what Milosz, and Roth, felt, and they make the selfishness at the heart of a writer’s life sound like the glorious liberation it is. But there’s also a riskier exposure at stake. The writer who bares others’ secrets must also bare her own, standing vulnerable before the people who purport to know her best. When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished, not just because the child is bound to tell the truth about her parents but because she must tell the truth about herself.
Elizabeth Strout’s novel “My Name Is Lucy Barton” is the story of a writer reckoning with the legacy of a scarred family life and slowly coming to terms with the costs and the rewards of her art. When Lucy is in her early twenties and newly married, she moves with her husband to New York, where they live in the West Village. Lucy is from Amgash, Illinois, more of a pinprick on the map than a town proper, and she grew up poor, sharing a single room with her brother, her sister, and her parents, a seamstress and a repairman of farm machinery; there was no heat, no toilet, and never enough to eat. Lucy got good grades, though, and escaped to Chicago on a scholarship. And she began writing stories. Two have been published, but she is shy about saying so. A neighbor takes an interest in her and, when he learns what she does, advises her to be ruthless. Lucy is caught short. “I did not think I was or could be ruthless,” she tells us. How she learns to become so is the subject of this quiet yet surprisingly fierce book.
“My Name Is Lucy Barton” was published in 2016 and quickly landed at the top of the Times best-seller list, bumping down “The Girl on the Train,” a thriller about a scorned, alcoholic woman, and “All the Light We Cannot See,” a historical heart-tugger about a blind one. Evidently, people also wanted to read about a more familiar sort of woman, a type almost too recognizable to warrant sustained attention—that is, one who suffers doubt but holds out hope for clarity, who applies herself imperfectly but insistently to the task of living.
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