My Name is Lucy Barton

Locations
Call Number: BOCD Fiction, Adult BOCD / Fiction / General / Strout, Elizabeth
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Traverwood Branch, Westgate Branch

Compact discs.
Read by Kimberly Farr.
The profound mother-daughter bond is explored through a mother's hospital visit to her estranged daughter by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys.Lucy Barton, a writer, married with two young children, is in the hospital in New York City due to an infection from a simple appendix operation. (Her medical condition is incidental-it's not about the illness).Her mother, whom she hasn't seen in years, comes from Amgash, Illinois, to visit her, and sits by her bedside, reminiscing about people she and Lucy know from Lucy's childhood, before Lucy went off to college and never returned.The power from this extraordinary book is in what remains unsaid between the lines of their gentle gossip, and what Lucy fills in for the reader about her troubled family, shamed by poverty, and how Lucy came to be a writer.All the big themes are here: class, the vulnerability of children, early wounds unable to heal.What makes the book reverberate with such feeling is the lacerating mother/daughter relationship. And yet at the end of the day you know how much these two women, regardless of the past, truly and deeply love each other.

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