Elizabeth’s Strout’s ninth book, “Lucy by the Sea,” is a haunting reminder of how...
Elizabeth’s Strout’s ninth book, “Lucy by the Sea,” is a haunting reminder of how it feels to have your life capsized by a global pandemic. In crisp, spare prose, Strout returns readers to that first, disorienting year when we were all unmoored, our lives undone by confusion, fear and, all too often, loss. The pandemic was and still is a paradox: We’re all in it together, but the experience is isolating and deeply personal.
Lucy Barton, the heroine of Strout’s “My Name Is Lucy Barton” and “Oh William!” , chronicles her life from March 2020 to April 2021. Her ex-husband, William, father of her two grown daughters, bundles her off to a small town in Maine, where he has rented a home in which the two of them can ride out the pandemic in platonic companionship.
For Lucy, as for most of us, the pandemic is a reckoning, a personal reset that compels her to examine her family, her past, her purpose. Lucy’s childhood was marked by extreme emotional and physical deprivation; her mother was particularly cruel and Lucy spent most of her days lonely, cold and hungry. Remembering those joyless years, Lucy says to William: “My whole childhood was a lockdown. I never saw anyone or went anywhere.
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