Elizabeth Strout
Author of Olive Kitteridge
About the Author
Elizabeth Strout (born January 6, 1956) is an American author of fiction. She was born in Portland, Maine. After graduating from Bates College, she spent a year in Oxford, England. In 1982 she graduated with honors, and received both a law degree from the Syracuse University College of Law and a show more Certificate of Gerontology from the Syracuse School of Social Work. Strout wrote Amy and Isabelle over the course of six or seven years, which when published was shortlisted for the 2000 Orange Prize and nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Amy and Isabelle was made into a television movie starring Elisabeth Shue and was produced by Oprah Winfrey's studio, Harpo Films. Strout was a NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) professor at Colgate University during the Fall Semester of 2007, where she taught creative writing. She was also on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 2009 Strout was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge, a collection of connected short stories she wrote about a woman and her immediate family who lived on the coast of Maine. Strout also wrote The Burgess Boys in 2013 which made The New York Times Best Seller List. Ms. Strout's title, My name is Lucy Barton, made the New York Times Best Seller List in 2016. Her newest title, Anything is Possible (2017), won the 2018 Story Prize. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Elizabeth Strout
A Different Road {short story} 2 copies
The Family Fortune 1 copy
The Fort 1 copy
Haluan kuulla kaiken 1 copy
Πες μου τα πάντα 1 copy
Associated Works
Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases (2020) — Contributor — 260 copies, 5 reviews
The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women's True Life Tales of Friendships that Blew Up, Burned Out or Faded Away (2005) — Contributor — 213 copies, 9 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1956-01-06
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Bates College (BA, 1977)
Syracuse University (JD, 1982) - Occupations
- faculty (MFA program, Queens University)
fiction writer
lecturer (Creative Writing ∙ Colgate University) - Organizations
- Queens University of Charlotte
- Agent
- Molly Friedrich (Aaron Priest Literary Agency)
- Short biography
- Elizabeth Strout (born January 6, 1956) is a US-American novelist and author. She is widely known for her works in literary fiction and her descriptive characterization. Born and raised in Portland, Maine, her experiences in her youth served as inspiration for her novels–the fictional "Shirley Falls, Maine" is the setting of four of her seven novels.
Strout's first novel, Amy and Isabelle (1998) met with widespread critical acclaim, became a national bestseller, and was adapted into a movie starring Elisabeth Shue. Her second novel, Abide with Me (2006), received critical acclaim but ultimately failed to be recognized to the extent of her debut novel. Two years later, Strout wrote and published Olive Kitteridge (2008), to critical and commercial success grossing nearly $25 million with over one million copies sold as of May 2017. The novel won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book was adapted into a multi Emmy Award-winning mini series and became a New York Times bestseller.
Five years later, she published The Burgess Boys (2013), which became a national bestseller. My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) was met with international acclaim and topped the New York Times bestseller list. Lucy Barton later became the main character in Strout's 2017 novel, Anything is Possible. A sequel to Olive Kitteridge, titled Olive, Again, was published in 2019. - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Portland, Maine, USA
- Places of residence
- Portland, Maine, USA
New York, New York, USA
Durham, New Hampshire, USA
Brunswick, Maine, USA - Map Location
- USA
Members
Reviews
In a brilliant sequel to My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible, Strout just keeps on revisiting, expanding and revealing more of her imaginative world.
This short book ruminates on the unknowability of another person, and of oneself, as life is built up of perceptions which may, or may not, be correct. It reports this through the first person reflections of Lucy following the death of her second husband, David, as she helps her first husband, William, deal with the discovery that he show more has an older half sister who his mother, Catherine Cole, had abandoned to be with William’s father, and had never mentioned.
I’m unsure what exactly touches me in Strout’s storytelling, the circling around the protagonist’s character with carefully meditative language, illuminating life with glimpses.
It’s odd, because on one hand I think I am invisible, but on the other I know what it is like to be marked as separate from society, only in my case no one knows it when they see me. But I thought that about that fat man. And about myself. (Page 201) show less
This short book ruminates on the unknowability of another person, and of oneself, as life is built up of perceptions which may, or may not, be correct. It reports this through the first person reflections of Lucy following the death of her second husband, David, as she helps her first husband, William, deal with the discovery that he show more has an older half sister who his mother, Catherine Cole, had abandoned to be with William’s father, and had never mentioned.
I’m unsure what exactly touches me in Strout’s storytelling, the circling around the protagonist’s character with carefully meditative language, illuminating life with glimpses.
It’s odd, because on one hand I think I am invisible, but on the other I know what it is like to be marked as separate from society, only in my case no one knows it when they see me. But I thought that about that fat man. And about myself. (Page 201) show less
This book resonated more strongly with me after I finished it than while I was reading it. As I read, it seemed as if not much was happening. It turns out that much was going on, both off-stage and in the halting conversations and pained silences that make up much of the surface plot. This effect is magnified by the understated voice of the narrator-protagonist, Lucy. Much is told by inference, so that I was unaware of the emotional weight behind the words, almost childlike in their show more simplicity. Her deeply observed insights snuck up on me, such as, “It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government—education, food, rent subsidies—are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government.” This sweeping criticism is immediately followed by what I thought of as a typical Lucyism: “I understand this in a way.”
The events are easily summarized. A routine appendix removal leads to a seven-week hospital stay. Lucy’s mother, who has never flown, arrives to keep vigil for five days, then leaves as abruptly as she came after the two achieve an oblique, unacknowledged reconciliation (they never address “the Thing,” something—abuse?—that happened to Lucy and somehow involved her PTSD-suffering father). Lucy’s favorite neighbor dies of AIDS. Lucy walks out on her marriage. She finds ersatz father-and-mother figures in the doctor who visits her daily during her hospital stay and in an older writer.
In a pomo touch, this book turns out to be about itself — that is, the clash of innocence and experience that Lucy dispassionately reports, thus turning it into this book. It’s about what it takes to be a writer; Lucy calls it ruthlessness, but it strikes me more as compassionate selfishness.
“I kept thinking,” Lucy reflects toward the end of the book, “how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another’s hearts.” Above all, this book is about imperfect people loving imperfect people. show less
The events are easily summarized. A routine appendix removal leads to a seven-week hospital stay. Lucy’s mother, who has never flown, arrives to keep vigil for five days, then leaves as abruptly as she came after the two achieve an oblique, unacknowledged reconciliation (they never address “the Thing,” something—abuse?—that happened to Lucy and somehow involved her PTSD-suffering father). Lucy’s favorite neighbor dies of AIDS. Lucy walks out on her marriage. She finds ersatz father-and-mother figures in the doctor who visits her daily during her hospital stay and in an older writer.
In a pomo touch, this book turns out to be about itself — that is, the clash of innocence and experience that Lucy dispassionately reports, thus turning it into this book. It’s about what it takes to be a writer; Lucy calls it ruthlessness, but it strikes me more as compassionate selfishness.
“I kept thinking,” Lucy reflects toward the end of the book, “how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another’s hearts.” Above all, this book is about imperfect people loving imperfect people. show less
Has there ever been a more difficult and confounding old white woman, in the whitest and most aged state in America, than the unsinkable Olive Kitteridge? With this sequel and expansion to the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge (and always seeing Frances McDormand as Olive in the fantastic mini-series), Olive is as iconic as the farm lady in American Gothic. I believe that she must have haunted author Strout until she created another book of linked short stories, half about Olive show more and half about her neighbors, and all about how the citizens of Crosby, Maine painfully separate from their children, age ingloriously, and die. Olive is remarried to Jack, a #MeToo'd Harvard professor and widower, who watches in amusement and affection as his wife fiercely tries to become "less Olive". Their odd-duck marriage assuages their loneliness while allowing them to gingerly confront the demons they share - the alienation of their children, their regret at the mistreatment of their deceased spouses, and their misplaced sense of superiority. Like an unexpected gift, characters from her previous novels Amy and Isabelle and The Burgess Boys resurface, testing the reader’s knowledge of the Strout oeuvre. The other stories intertwine peripherally with Olive’s, and are rife with struggles to survive tragedies and the ennui of endless northern winters. Once again, Strout has created a work that causes almost physical heartache for the reader.
Quote: "There were openings into the darkness of a relationship one saw by mistake, as if inside a dark barn, the door had been momentarily blown off and one saw things not meant to be seen." show less
Quote: "There were openings into the darkness of a relationship one saw by mistake, as if inside a dark barn, the door had been momentarily blown off and one saw things not meant to be seen." show less
Audio Book. A book about the loneliness in the lives of some of the people acquainted with Olive and with Olive herself. Thoughtful, funny and sad. Kirkus: The thorny matriarch of Crosby, Maine, makes a welcome return.As in Strout?s Pulitzer Prize?winning Olive Kitteridge (2008, etc.), the formidable title character is always a presence but not always onstage in these 13 interconnected tales of loneliness, loss, and love in its many flawed incarnations. Olive has not become any easier to show more like since her husband, Henry, died two years ago; ?stupid? is a favorite adjective, and ?phooey to you? a frequent term of dismissal. But over the course of about a decade we see Olive struggling, in her flinty way, to become ?oh, just a tinytiny¥bit better as a person.? Her second marriage, to Jack Kennison, helps. ?I like you, Olive,? he says. ?I?m not sure why, really. But I do.? Readers will feel the same, as she brusquely comforts a former student with cancer in ?Light? and commiserates with the grieving daughter-in-law she has never much liked in ?Motherless Child.? Yet that story ends with Olive?s desolate conclusion that she is largely responsible for her fraught relationship with her son: ?She herself had [raised] a motherless child.? Parents are estranged from children, husbands from wives, siblings from each other in this keening portrait of a world in which each of us is fundamentally alone and never truly knows even those we love the most. This is not the whole story, Strout demonstrates with her customary empathy and richness of detail. ?You must have been a very good mother,? Olive?s doctor says after observing Christopher in devoted attendance at the hospital after she has a heart attack, and the daughter of an alcoholic mother and dismissive, abusive father finds a nurturing substitute in her parents? lawyer in ?Helped.? The beauty of the natural world provides a sustaining counterpoint to charged human interactions in which ?there were so many things that could not be said.? There?s no simple truth about human existence, Strout reminds us, only wonderful, painful complexity. ?Well, that?s life," Olive says. "Nothing you can do about it.?Beautifully written and alive with compassion, at times almost unbearably poignant. A thrilling book in every way. show less
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Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 24
- Also by
- 11
- Members
- 33,125
- Popularity
- #580
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 1,962
- ISBNs
- 461
- Languages
- 24
- Favorited
- 60
