Recommendations
Books Like My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
For readers of the spare, oblique hospital novel
If you loved My Name Is Lucy Barton — Lucy's hospitalization, her estranged mother's five-day visit, and the oblique, compressed way Strout approaches the most devastating emotional territory — these books share the same formal precision, the same interest in what people cannot say directly, and the same understanding of the damage families do.
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Buy on AmazonOh William!
by Elizabeth Strout
The direct companion — Lucy in her 60s with her first husband William; the continuation of the Lucy Barton series and the essential next book for anyone who wants more of Lucy's voice and the relationship she has with William.
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Buy on AmazonOlive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's Pulitzer-winning Maine novel in stories — the companion in her fiction; where My Name Is Lucy Barton is spare and radically compressed, Olive Kitteridge is more comprehensive and more conventionally structured; both share Strout's essential emotional intelligence.
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Buy on AmazonThe Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Cunningham's Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in literary fiction that approaches the most devastating emotional territory obliquely; Virginia Woolf and the two other women are the formal companion to Lucy's oblique approach to what she cannot say directly.
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Buy on AmazonHousekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's debut novel — the companion in American fiction with a distinctive, heightened prose style rooted in a specific place and a specific kind of female experience; Ruth and Sylvie's Idaho is the Northwestern companion to Lucy's Illinois.
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Buy on AmazonThe Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
Didion's memoir about grief and the year after her husband's death — the companion in prose that approaches emotional devastation obliquely and with formal precision; Didion's methodology of returning to the same material from different angles is a non-fiction version of what Strout's novel does.
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Buy on AmazonDept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill
Offill's fragmented novel about a marriage in crisis — the companion in formally radical, compressed literary fiction that works through compression and indirection; the fragmentary approach to emotional material that can't be addressed directly is the formal companion to Strout's oblique approach.
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Buy on AmazonThe Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's companion Maine novel — the family dynamics and the community portrait; the most conventionally structured of Strout's novels and a good companion to the spare radicalism of My Name Is Lucy Barton.
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Buy on AmazonOlive, Again
by Elizabeth Strout
The companion Olive novel — Olive in old age; the continuation of Strout's Maine world and her most explicitly meditative account of what people finally come to see about themselves.
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