Key themes
- Poverty as shame that outlasts poverty itself
- The mother-daughter relationship that could never be made whole
- Becoming a writer as an act of survival
About this book
Lucy Barton lies in a New York hospital recovering from a procedure that has unexpectedly gone wrong. Her estranged mother comes to sit with her and they talk — about people from home, about almost nothing — for five days. Strout's novel about memory, poverty, shame and the impossibility of escaping where you came from is compressed to something very like perfection.
Published in 2016, My Name Is Lucy Barton was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and named by many critics as one of the decade's essential novels. Strout has said she wrote it to explore what it meant to love someone you were terrified of.
Discussion questions
- Lucy and her mother talk for five days in the hospital and never say the things that need to be said. How does Strout show this oblique communication — and what does it tell us about the damage that precedes it?
- Lucy is a writer, and the novel is aware of itself as a written object. How does Strout use this self-consciousness — about what gets written down and why?
- The novel is very short and very compressed. What does Strout leave out — and what does the omission do that fuller treatment could not?
- Lucy's childhood poverty and its particular humiliations are described sparingly but precisely. How does Strout make poverty feel without making it spectacle?
- My Name Is Lucy Barton exists in relation to several other Strout novels — Abide With Me, the Olive Kitteridge books. Does knowing the broader context add to its meaning?
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