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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

Life circles: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

23/4/2016

6 Comments

 
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As a child, Lucy Barton was the strange kid no-one wanted to talk to, who, lacking a television, knew nothing of popular culture and who, according to the other kids, stank. At home, she and her two older siblings were emotionally neglected, often hungry, and periodically on the receiving end of a vicious slap. Lucy hung around at school at the end of the day for the warmth. Too small to have a library, there were nevertheless books in the classrooms and it was in books that Lucy discovered both a solution to her loneliness and her own secret desire to write.

Reading proves to be her salvation, gaining her an expenses-paid college place and an entry into a more comfortable world. But, when she marries a man with German ancestry, her parents feel betrayed and break contact, citing her father’s painful memories of the war. Years later, living in New York with two young daughters of her own, an unexpectedly protracted hospital stay brings her estranged mother to her bedside where, while gossiping about the past, they collude in avoiding the more painful memories that both bind and divide them. Years later, Lucy’s marriage is crumbling as she strives to make her way as a writer, learning to be ruthless, to claim her authorial authority and to refuse to justify her work.

Pleasingly, the novel does not follow Lucy’s life chronologically but starts around the middle with the hospitalisation and roams backwards and forwards in time. While Lucy’s mysterious complications following an appendicectomy furnish an effective narrative device for the rambling conversation between mother and daughter, it struck me as all too convenient (although it did give me an idea for structuring something I might or might not want to write in the future). Despite the medical crisis that has her sent for a middle-of-the-night CAT scan, I wasn’t convinced of either the physicality of her illness; nor, despite her weariness, of the mental impact. For me, it was almost as if Lucy was pretending to be ill.

But illness isn’t really what this novel is about. Yet, as can often occur with my reviews, I did wonder what it was about, as it read to me like a cross between a memoir and creative writing manual, although I was enjoying it more than I’d enjoy either of those. Before sharing my eventual conclusion, I’ll let Sarah Payne, Lucy’s creative writing tutor give us her verdict (p107):

This is a story of a man who’s been tortured every day of his life for things he did in the war. This is the story of a wife who stayed with him, because most wives did in that generation, and she comes to her daughter’s hospital room and talks compulsively about everyone’s marriage going bad, she doesn’t even know it, doesn’t even know that’s what she’s doing. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly.

That first line reminded me of the character Leonard, the protagonist’s father, in my own novel, Sugar and Snails and his impact on her life and consequent crucial role in the story. But what the fictional writing tutor could have added, is that My Name Is Lucy Barton is the story of a woman being shaped by her past, and some of the consequences of insecure attachment, such as being unable to bear the sound of a baby’s cry. It’s about how one must leave home to be a writer but how we need to return to understand what we are leaving behind and to mourn what we haven’t had.

This is an extremely rich novel that merits revisiting, and is short enough for that not to be a chore. It would be a good one for book groups and for anyone interested in the writing process. My hardback version, courtesy of the publishers Viking Penguin, is an object of beauty with its cloth binding, so definitely a keeper as far as I’m concerned.

I read and reviewed this novel some weeks ago, but was holding back on posting to add something more. What that might be, I didn’t know, until Norah Colvin, deputising for Charli Mills, presented the Rough Writers with a flash fiction challenge on circles. It struck me that the structure of novels like Lucy Barton isn’t best described as an absence of the linear desire-driven plot, but as circular, moving around different episodes in the main character’s life, gradually adding more depth. Wolf in White Van has a similar structure as does, although I hedged my bets and had a more linear structure for the contemporary strand, my own novel, Sugar and Snails.
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To my mind, that’s what life’s like: we’re moving forward in terms of increasing age and life goals, while still circling round our pasts. At least hat’s how it seems if you take part in the world of therapy, as we seek out the narrative about ourselves that we can live with. Which brings me to create my first ever fictional psychotherapist (I’m not counting the clinical psychologist who administers aversion therapy in Sugar and Snails) who, like Hannah Pool in The Art of the Imperfect by Kate Evans, is a little anxious about her training:

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Circling therapy

How many times must I hear how special she was? Perfect child, perfect parent, perfect wife, perfect cook. Why does she come, except to bore the socks off me? My face stays attentive while my mind roams free. What I’ll cook for dinner. Tomorrow’s group supervision. My show-off colleagues spouting theory. Their clients making progress week after week. My caseload of no-hopers who’ll make me fail the course.


A shiver runs through me, bile rises in my throat. Shit, she’d been that kind of special! No faking our connection now. I nod. She sobs. She really talks.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
6 Comments
Norah Colvin link
24/4/2016 07:33:49 am

Brilliant post, Anne. I really enjoyed this one, as I usually do, but especially when you are delving into psychology and what makes the characters tick as you have in this one. What made it even more interesting for me was something that I wrote in my post and then omitted. When I mentioned going around in circles I had added, and then deleted, that we often need to go around in circles until we learned what we needed to from the situation. We don't have to physically go around them, or even remain in them going around in circles, but sometimes that occurs. Sometimes we just turn them round and round in our heads, often skirting around the edges, until we figure out what they mean. I must have left it out so that you could explain it all the more clearly.
I wondered about the professionalism of the writing in the novel when I read Sarah Payne's verdict of the novel.It didn't inspire me; and if she was the tutor, I wondered about the student.
However I loved what you suggested could have been added. Both eloquent and insightful, the words you have highlighted (for linking!) tell the essence of the story as I understand it from your review: shaped by the past, insecure attachment, need to leave home to be a writer, but need to return to understand. You are always the Queen of Links, adding depth to your posts by providing others in support of their points. This is a beauty for your interrogation of, not only this novel but, our progression through life (and therapy?)
Love your flash. Sometimes we need those moments away in our thoughts to reach clarity. Beautifully done.

Reply
Annecdotist
26/4/2016 10:00:16 am

Thanks, Norah, and fascinating that you’d planned to write something similar about the tendency to mentally go around in circles. Interesting also that you didn’t like the quote from the novel the way I did.
I think I get a bit obsessional about the links and maybe need to cut back – they do make the post twice as long to write! But I do like those interconnections.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
26/4/2016 01:20:41 pm

You are the Queen of Links, Anne. I appreciate them there. I don't always follow them all, but I do if one piques my interest. Some I remember reading and don't need to check again. Sometimes when I do, I find a new perspective I missed previously.
I wasn't sure about this statement: "you didn’t like the quote from the novel the way I did".
Do you mean we both didn't like it the same way; or that I didn't like it in a different way from the way you liked/didn't like it.
(Oh dear, I think my phrasing is just as ambiguous.)
I like your statement about the book.

Reply
Annecdotist
26/4/2016 01:42:28 pm

Ha, you’re right, it isn’t clear! I’m preparing a very short talk for the British Psychological Society conference tomorrow, where I’m saying that I’ve had to improve the standard of my writing in the transition to fiction. Hopefully nobody will use the rushed comments on my blog as a measure of this.
I meant I liked the quote but you didn’t, and I found that quite interesting! Isn’t it your bedtime anyway?

Reply
Carol Hedges
27/4/2016 08:16:37 am

Fascinating to read both the two assessments of the novel and your mini-convo. As someone who gets reviewed, I'm even more interested in what interpretation the reviewer came to about the book than the number of stars allocated. Sometimes, a whole new trench of ideas opens up and, as the writer, one thinks: well, I never thought of that, or, I must remember that for the next book. I think the main thing is that readers form SOME idea in their minds about the book, which will of necessity be subjective, based on their own reading experiences, of their own relationships etc. Fiction thus can either shed light on an area or reinforce something deeply personal, or maybe brign to the light an aspect of one's life that needs re-examining. Eep...heading off now....x

Reply
Annecdotist
28/4/2016 01:38:22 pm

Thanks for your comment, Carol, and I so agree that we can learn from reviews. I think it’s really exciting if someone has enjoyed what I’ve written but found something in it I hadn’t known was there. Takes us into another circle to explore different issues!

Reply



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