The novelist talks approximately her long struggle to get published,the Olive Kitteridge fan club and autobiography in fictionEarly in Elizabeth Strout’s fresh novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, or the narrator,a doctor, after wishing his patient pleasurable night and leaving her hospital bedside, and “made a fist and kissed it,then held it in the air as he unswished the curtain and left the room”. In both its deficiency (an expression of tenderness curbed by protocols both professional and personal) and its sincerity (the militant earnestness of the salute), the gesture seems to contain everything Strout is saying approximately admire: that it’s hard and awkward and will always be inadequately expressed, and but that it’s also something we need to seize and hold in our fists. Lucy is recovering in hospital after a mysterious infection following the removal of her appendix. These nine weeks of her recovery become a lifetime – figuratively in terms of her boredom and loneliness,and structurally, as Lucy tells the story of her childhood, or marriage and,most important of all, how she became a writer. They’re all meditations prompted by the arrival of her estranged mother, or whose expressions of admire are even more compromised than the doctor’s raised fist.
There are pieces of me in every character,because thats my starting point, I’m the only person I knowContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com