My Name is Lucy Barton

On a writing course Lucy Barton is told that ‘we all have only one story to tell‘. Now a successful writer she remembers a time in the mid 1980’s when she was first living in New York with her husband and two young daughters and a trip to hospital for a routine operation lasted for nine weeks.

One day she realises that her mother, who she hasn’t seen for years, is sitting by her hospital bed. She stays for five days and through their conversations we get Lucy’s story. Memories of poverty, humiliation and loneliness are told in a solid, unfussy style. She speaks directly to us, as her memories and her mothers anecdotes interrupt and overlap each other and she wonders about the vagaries of her memory as she thinks about her life.

‘We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois.’

Her childhood living in a garage with her parents and brother and sister, with just ‘a trickle of water from a makeshift sink’ is marked by the kind of cultural and financial deprivation that separates you from your peers, since with no access to television or magazines you simply can’t join in. Lonely and isolated Lucy find her refuge in reading and learns quickly that home work takes on a new meaning when you can stay in a warm classroom to get it done. With good grades she wins a scholarship to college and once there tries to fit in by imitating her class mates.

_{(Laura Linney in the stage adaptation)}

But with a childhood based on survival she isn’t prepared for the world at all, and even with the wisdom and success she’s garnered she can’t imitate the confidence that comes from a loving home or the relaxed attitude that comes from a home not on the breadline. Even when she’s older and married she can’t get used to the ease with which her husband buys tickets for a football game and then buys hotdogs and beer without a second thought, it’s the kind of thing I don’t think Lucy will ever be able to do.

Families are odd, complex things, and through Lucy’s memories and her mothers stories about people from their past, we get a hint of the roots that tie this dysfunctional family together. It’s a chaotic, secretive family, as Lucy says of her sister Vicky: ‘we were equally friendless and equally scorned, and we eyed each other with the same suspicion with which we eyed the rest of the world.’ Vicky is angry and her brother reads The Little House on the Prairie into adulthood The parents seem unable to provide any stability, a father who can humiliate his son in public but then cradle him like a baby, or lock his young daughter in a truck for hours on end and then soothe her in his arms, and a mother who beats them without warning. And yet, Lucy is overwhelmingly happy that her mother has come to see her and delighted that she calls her ‘Wizzle’, her family pet name. And despite each resenting or ignoring Lucy’s success she still sends money home.

There aren’t any answers or neat endings, Lucy talks about her life in a matter of fact way and I thought this was an excellent novel about family trauma, new beginnings, New York, writing and the power of reading.