Reading Order
My Name Is Lucy Barton Reading Order
My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) by Elizabeth Strout is her fifth novel and one of her most formally radical — the story of Lucy Barton, a successful New York writer in her late 30s, who has been hospitalized for months with a mysterious complication after an appendectomy, and whose mother, from whom she has been estranged, comes to sit with her for several days. The novel is told by Lucy as an older woman looking back at this period, and it is structured around the conversations she and her mother had during those days — oblique, evasive, full of the things they could not say directly — and around Lucy's memories of her difficult rural Illinois childhood, her abusive father, her family's poverty. My Name Is Lucy Barton is very short — under 200 pages — and its brevity is part of its method: the novel works through compression and indirection, saying the most important things obliquely. The relationship between Lucy and her mother is one of the most subtle portrayals of a mother-daughter relationship in contemporary fiction — the damage done and the love underneath it are inseparable, neither canceling the other, and Strout handles both with extraordinary precision. The novel is the first in what became the Lucy Barton series, continued in Oh William! (2021) and Lucy by the Sea (2022).
Where to start
My Name Is Lucy Barton — any Random House paperback. Short, reads in a single sitting, can be read as a standalone. Oh William! (2021) is the direct companion, following Lucy in her 60s with her first husband William.
Complete My Name Is Lucy Barton Book List
- 1Buy
My Name Is Lucy Barton
Elizabeth Strout·2016·The novel — Lucy Barton's hospitalization, her estranged mother's visit, her memories of Illinois childhood; the first Lucy Barton novel and Strout's most formally radical work; short, spare, oblique, and devastating. - 2Buy
Oh William!
Elizabeth Strout·2021·The companion sequel — Lucy in her 60s with her first husband William during a complicated period in his life; the companion in Strout's Lucy Barton series. - 3Buy
Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout·2008·Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in stories — the companion in her fiction; where My Name Is Lucy Barton is spare and formally radical, Olive Kitteridge is more traditionally structured and more comprehensive; both share Strout's essential concerns. - 4Buy
The Burgess Boys
Elizabeth Strout·2013·Strout's companion Maine novel — the family relationships at the center of the novel are the companion in her fiction about what we inherit from our families. - 5Buy
Olive, Again
Elizabeth Strout·2019·The companion Olive novel — the continuation of Strout's most famous character in old age; the companion in her linked stories mode. - 6Buy
The Hours
Michael Cunningham·1998·Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in literary fiction approaching devastating emotional territory obliquely; Virginia Woolf and the two women are the formal companion to Lucy's oblique approach to what she cannot say directly. - 7Buy
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson·1980·Robinson's debut novel — the companion in American fiction with a distinctive, heightened prose style rooted in a specific place and in a specific kind of female experience; Ruth and Sylvie's Idaho is the Northwestern version of Lucy's Illinois, both novels about young women shaped by damaged family structures. - 8Buy
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan·2010·Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in formally innovative American fiction told from multiple perspectives and across time; where My Name Is Lucy Barton is quiet and spare, A Visit from the Goon Squad is loud and structurally elaborate; both show what formal experiment can do to emotional material.
My Name Is Lucy Barton — Frequently Asked Questions
What is My Name Is Lucy Barton about?
My Name Is Lucy Barton is narrated by Lucy Barton, a successful New York writer in her early 40s (the narrating Lucy is older, looking back), who was hospitalized for many months in the 1980s with a mysterious complication after an appendectomy. During her hospitalization, her mother comes from Illinois to sit with her for five days — this is the first time Lucy has seen her mother in many years. The novel is structured around those five days: the conversations Lucy and her mother have, which are oblique and evasive and full of things they cannot say directly, and Lucy's memories of her childhood in Amgash, Illinois — her family's poverty, her father's cruelty, her mother's inability to protect her.
What is the mother-daughter relationship like?
The relationship between Lucy and her mother is the heart of the novel and one of the most precisely rendered mother-daughter relationships in contemporary fiction. Lucy's mother hurt her — through passivity, through failure to protect Lucy from her father, through ways that are not fully specified but whose damage is clear. Yet when the mother comes to sit with Lucy in the hospital, something happens between them that is recognizably love — they talk obliquely about neighbors and people from their Illinois community, not about anything important directly, but the fact of the mother's presence and her staying for five days is itself something. Strout refuses to resolve the relationship into either condemnation or forgiveness.
Why is the novel so short?
My Name Is Lucy Barton is deliberately short — under 200 pages — because brevity is part of its method. The novel works through compression and indirection: it says the most important things at an angle, in the gaps between what Lucy and her mother discuss. A longer novel would have forced Strout to spell out what the short novel's form keeps oblique, and the obliqueness is the point. Lucy is a writer, and the novel is partly about how writers process experience — not by confronting it directly but by approaching it from the side, in the way Strout's own prose approaches its most devastating material.
How does My Name Is Lucy Barton relate to Strout's other novels?
My Name Is Lucy Barton is set outside Maine (in New York and Illinois, with the hospital as the central location) and in a different mode from Olive Kitteridge — more formally spare, more compressed, more explicitly about a writer looking back at her difficult past. But it shares Strout's essential concerns: difficult mothers, the families we come from, the way damage and love coexist in the same relationship, and the ways the past continues to shape the present. The Lucy Barton series (My Name Is Lucy Barton, Oh William!, Lucy by the Sea) represents one strand of Strout's fiction; the Olive Kitteridge books and The Burgess Boys represent the Maine community strand.
What should I read after My Name Is Lucy Barton?
After My Name Is Lucy Barton, Oh William! (2021) is the direct companion in the Lucy Barton series. Lucy by the Sea (2022) continues the series further. Olive Kitteridge (2008) is Strout's Pulitzer-winning Maine novel. For American fiction in the same spare, formally precise mode, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking are important companions.
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