Tag Archives: Elizabeth Strout

August 10, 2025 · 3:21 am

The Burgess Boys: If You Don’t Like Elizabeth Strout I Don’t Want To Hear About It

For years if someone liked a food I found disgusting I’d explain to them why they were wrong and how whatever it was was gross. Turns out this is neither a polite, nor particularly well received exchange. You’re meant to just say ‘oh’ and privately think the other person is wrong and their food choices disgusting. Is it different for book (and movies and TV)? Probably it’s meant to be the same. But my face clearly outwardly flinches when someone tells me how much they enjoyed a book that is objectively bad . (And this from the reader who unashamedly told her boss about the glories of Fourth Wing.)

All this to say I love Elizabeth Strout and at the park the other night was explaining to some other parent (who, to be fair, definitely didn’t care about the book I was reading and definitely didn’t want to be listening to me *at length* describing how great it is, but was trapped both by my enthusiasm and No Clear Exit) and she told me she just didn’t care for Olive Kitteridge. The moment was worse – surely worse – then some partisan political exchange. I looked at her with utter disbelief. What is wrong with this woman, I thought, and thankfully didn’t say. But surely my face and eyes did because I am me and I cannot control my face.

All this to say. I loved The Burgess Boys as I have loved everything else Elizabeth Strout and I do not want to hear about it if you didn’t.

I’ve said before that books find me (all of us) at odd times. Or maybe we read into them whatever it is we need in that time. With The Burgess Boys when the young nephew of Bob Burgess is arrested and detained for throwing a pig’s head into a mosque, and then is surprised by the scale of reaction and consequence and the rest of the book follows how this one decision reverberates through a family I thought ah. Ah.

Which is all to say had I read it another time, or in different circumstances, I might have been struck instead by the way Bob’s entire sense of identity is shifted by his brother Jim’s revelation about the death of their father. Or the thread of the novel that is about how we make our own stories and that these stories are all that matter (not any fact you might claim as such). Or the thread of a marriage betrayal. Or that of discovering love when you aren’t expecting it. Or of the gap between celebrity and individual experience. Or.

But we find in great novels what we need in the moment we read them. And in this Strout novel I found consolation, and beauty, and the reminder that whatever we are in – it is already changing. And that these, the stories we tell of ourselves, our mistakes, our worst moments – are ours to make.

Leave a comment

Filed under American literature, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , , ,

May 7, 2025 · 9:53 am

Oh William! In a world of too many books to read, read Elizabeth Strout

There’s an argument for God* to be made in the way that sometimes, right when you need it most, a book finds you. It’s how I felt about Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and it’s how I feel about Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William. The book was already extremely overdue at the library, and I had intended to put it in the pile among (too many) others that I ambitiously checked out only to run up against the realities of my limited time. But I’d been looking forward to it, having recently finished Tell Me Everything which I loved, and I figured what is the worst the public library can do? (I know, I know, I owe the library more respect then that. I do know.)

And well Oh William is like all the other Strout books I’ve read in its direct tone, in its simplicity of story, in its beauty of writing. In this one Lucy Barton reflects on her first marriage with William. What brought her to him, why she left, what the staying and leaving cost her, what she needed from him when they were together, what she needed from him after, and how you can love someone through all the many odd and unexpected permutations of a life.

More then a story about their marriage though – or alongside it maybe – is that of William’s mother, Catherine. How she left her one-year old daughter to go start a life with another man, and how the rest of her life was haunted by that decision (and William in discovering this secret must confront the truth that his mother was not who or how he thought she was, but someone more and different, and aren’t we all). Lucy makes the parallels to her own leaving of her daughters when she left William and how this decision hurt her daughters and was necessary. I guess something about what sacrifices mothers are called to make, or make differently from fathers (or presented as such, I guess).

Why did I need this book right now? I suppose there was something to the reminder in it that the stories we have about ourselves and the people we love are just that: stories. That they are written, rewritten and edited in the too many experiences or misunderstandings of our everyday. That we are not and are relationships are not One Thing.

And in a time – still a time – when there is much that is far, far beyond our scope of control (if not influence), there is something so heartening and humbling in the reminder that of this – the story of your life and its decisions – you do have some authority.

*Stipulated I do not believe in God, but you can try to translate as something like love, or interconnection, or mystery.

1 Comment

Filed under Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , ,

January 14, 2025 · 2:16 am

Tell Me Everything: Elizabeth Strout is Not a Unitarian. But could be.

I’ve told so many people recently to read Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything and I’m desperately anxious that other people won’t love it as much as I did, so if you hated it, or even felt kind of ambivalent about it, just let’s pretend neither of us read it and never talk about it together.

In the universe of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton this one is a close look at Bob Burgess who cannot see himself clearly. A book about Bob, but a book about how every life – those we know and more those we don’t – has a story (and in that story, matters). And how we try to figure out what a life means (in one heartbreaking and also sideways funny scene Lucy asks Bob exactly that – what does it mean) even when this is a question as pointless as it is pressing.

How Bob saves and doesn’t save – and eats the sins – of all those around him. How he sacrifices what he barely realizes he wants in aid of those around him, knowing, somehow the right thing to do quickly and with exhaustion.

The writing, as always, is this hard-to-explain balance of direct – telling you exactly what a character is thinking, or meaning, or what a thematic moment is “about” – and the evocative – letting a gesture carry the weight of all the possible explanations: Lucy wears odd socks. LUCY WEARS ODD SOCKS.

Take Bob’s wife, Margaret, the Unitarian minister, who only in nearly losing her job realizes the humility with which she must approach the pulpit. And in nearly losing Bob realizes what he needs of her as partner. I loved Margaret for her fullness (all of the characters in these books are full) and the scene that describes her nightgown – which may be the same scene or one adjacent where Bob speculates she is a narcissist – that does this brilliant work of both telling us exactly what is happening and lets it unfold in the scene itself.

(So many Unitarian threads beyond Margaret (meaning in community; community to support individual journey; life is meaningful for the impact we have on others; etc etc and on) I just googled whether Strout is a Unitarian: she is not.)

I’m not sure whether to tell you to start with this one if you’ve not read Strout before, but maybe it doesn’t matter – grab any one of the books and enjoy a universe where the small moments are worthy and your story is, too.

2 Comments

Filed under American literature, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , , ,

September 15, 2023 · 2:22 am

Lucy By the Sea (and My Name is Lucy Barton)

I had brunch with S. recently where she reminded me of the amazing-ness of Elizabeth Strout. So I promptly ordered My Name is Lucy Barton and Lucy by the Sea. In no small part because of my own L. Minor hiccup about 2/3rds into My Name is Lucy Barton when I realized I’d already read it, but no matter, it was a good refresher before Lucy takes to the sea.

And off she goes at the start of the pandemic and the book is so beautiful. It captures painfully and brilliantly the uncertainty of March and April 2020 for rich people living in North America. The dread and loss and fear. Reading it knowing how the course of the pandemic runs (and runs) it takes an extra sort of writerly magic to find a way to suspend that knowledge for the reader – to bring right back the ways time folded and expanded, compressed and ballooned.

I did find some of the writing grating – don’t get me wrong: extremely beautiful – but also the short sentences and declaration of feelings or thoughts just a bit much. Maybe only because I read the two so closely together that Lucy became a claustrophobic mind to occupy (though again it’s probably a credit to Strout that we so fully occupy Lucy’s perspective).

Anyway, it’s a fast, beautiful read, if you’re ready to revisit those days.

1 Comment

Filed under Fiction, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , ,