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From Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout comes a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown--and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart. "No novelist working today has Strout's extraordinary capacity for radical empathy. . . . May droves of readers come to feel enlarged, comforted, and genuinely uplifted by Lucy's story."--The Boston Globe With her trademark spare, crystalline prose--a voice infused with "intimate, fragile, desperate humanness" (The Washington Post)--Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through the early days of the pandemic. As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart--the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.… (more)
I read [Lucy Barton] several years ago , and really loved it. This was a bit of a slog that I nearly DNF'd at page 175 , or sooner. Fortunately, I continued to the end of the book, and my interest in the story increased. It's a character driven story, about Lucy Barton, her ex-husband William, and their two daughters and others that takes place during the Covid 19 pandemic. I felt that story lacked any real focus and it was slow going for much of the book. Lucy is grieving the loss her of husband, David, and she and her ex-husband move to a small town in Maine to attempt to escape the pandemic. They and their daughter's struggle with love , loss and relationships. I did like it enough to continue the series with the next book, [Tell Me Everything]. ( )
[b:Lucy by the Sea|60657583|Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)|Elizabeth Strout|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1650574627l/60657583._SY75_.jpg|95604434] appeared on my library holds and I wasn't sure I wanted to read a quiet domestic novel taking place in 2020, but it turned out ideal for the seasonal bustle. Lucy's empathy for others is perfect holiday spirit with even references to [b:Olive Kitteridge|1736739|Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)|Elizabeth Strout|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320430655l/1736739._SY75_.jpg|3263906]who is still going strong in the Maple Tree Apartments. Of course, it is a COVID novel which might put some off but it was a relief to be looking back to the distancing and outside dinners rather than amidst the pre-vax quarantines.
"I wondered, What is it like to be a policeman, especially now, these days? What is it like to be you? I need to say: this is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person." Lucy's curiosity moves the book along and makes her a believable narrator. Fourth in the series, I missed a couple of the books but that did not hamper my enjoyment of this well crafted story. ( )
Since reading this book, I've talked about it many times. It is small in scope, taking place during the pandemic and playing with the passage of time in a way I deeply enjoyed. I have been craving books that deal with the communal and global experience of Covid-19, and this book dealt with the loneliness and forms of new intimacy created during isolation.
SPOILERS: There were two moments that most astonished me with how well they were crafted.
The first was when Lucy's brother died after contracting Covid-19 at her conservative and religious sister's Thanksgiving celebration. The struggle of getting her sister to understand how bad Covid-19 was (while remaining isolated from much of the knowledge herself) depicted without being heavy-handed the deep rifts in our country as they most often express themselves.
The second was when Lucy met with her daughters for the third time after they all went into isolation. Dealing with the mechanics of the end of quarantine and revisiting New York City, so different from how she remembered it, she is confronted by how her decision to reunite with her daughter's father has bothered them. While Lucy moved in with him at the start of the pandemic, everyone understood it to be about safety and convenience. Once her daughters learned she'd resumed a romantic and sexual relationship with their dad, they worried he had manipulated her by arranging the situation. Lucy doesn't engage with this as they hoped, ultimately admitting that she doesn't know if that's true or not but that she's happy with her life.
That moment deeply underscored the realities of living an often unextraordinary life in extraordinary circumstances. The book as a whole allowed for the contradictions many people left behind when we could resume business as usual and leave behind our new normal. ( )
The 4th book about Lucy Barton, and this one is set during the Covid pandemic. Reading it at this distance - 4 years seems a long time but its still pretty fresh in the memory - made me feel a little peculiar, so many small details are captured about the early days of the pandemic that I've blanked out of my memory. The fear, panic, strange behaviour. This book also sees Lucy and William deepen their relationship and try to do their best by their family during these difficult times. Its very thoughtful and straightforward. I really love how Elizabeth Strout writes. ( )
Lucy Barton returns in this fourth edition to the Amgash series, Lucy reflects on the virus which resulted in a pandemic. She thinks about how this unexpected event was scary and created a lot of uncertainty. People were wearing masks and needing to maintain “social distancing” from others. It was such a reminder of the Flu Epidemic in 1918. Although William is her ex-husband, he has always remained her closest friend. He takes her to a house on the Maine coast to help alleviate her worries. Everyone needed to “lock down” where they were to avoid transmission or vulnerability to the virus. All this together time provides a unique opportunity to reminisce on the past both good and bad such as their kids and infidelities. They discussed people in their lives over the years and how far they have come from meager beginnings. Together they conclude how their lives have changed over the years and their shared memories sustain their continued connection. ( )
The disarming situation described at the opening of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel might seem fantastical, the stuff of a million post-apocalyptic movies, were it not for the fact that every single one of us has recently lived through it. And lockdown especially. Strout isn’t the first writer to go there, but she certainly makes magnificent and thrilling use of it in this, her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet
Who knows why people are different? We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world takes its swings at us. (19%)
Grief is a private thing. God, is it a private thing. (21%)
But Becka seemed to disappear from me. I even felt she was avoiding me; I would call her and she would not call me back for a day or two. When she did speak to me her voice was rather flat. "Mom, I'm really okay, please don't worry so much about me," she said. It hurt my heart with heaviness as though a damp and dirty dishcloth lay across it. But of course she was grieving her marriage, no matter how unhappy she may have been in it—this thought finally arrived to me. And I thought, Lucy, you are so stupid not to have realized that. (32%)
I understood... that the childhood isolation of fear and lonliness would never leave one. (62%)
It is a gift in this life that we do not know what awaits us. (78%)
Everyone has to feel like they matter. I did not feel that I mattered. Because in a way I have never been able to feel that. And so the days were hard. (84%)
And then I remembered one time when I was pregnant with Chrissy, I had looked down at my big stomach and put my hand over it and thought: Whoever you are, you do not belong to me. My job is to help you get into the world, but you do not belong to me. (98%)
There was a feeling of mutedness.
Like my ears were plugged up as though I was underwater.
he said his life was not much different with the pandemic. He said, "I've been socially distancing for sixty-six years."
It seemed strange to me that the world of New York would remain so beautiful as all those people were dying.
The question of why some people are luckier than others—I have no answer for this.
It has been said that the second year of widowhood is worse than the first—the idea being, I think, that the shock has worn off and now one has to simply live with the loss
I did not speak of this to William. William likes to fix things, and this could not be fixed.
Almost always, there was that sense of being underwater; of things not being real.
I guess many of us have regrets, he wrote, but my regrets seem to grow as I get older.
The sadness that rose and fell in me was like the tides.
There was for me during this time a sense of being dazed. As though, in a way, I was not capable of taking in everything that was happening in this way.
We went by old cemeteries and we stopped at one and read the names and dates on the headstones. William, walking ahead of me, said, "Lucy, look at this." And I went to where he was standing, he swept his arm, and I saw that there were a number of tombstones that had death dates in 1918 and 1919, and they were not always old people who had died. "The flu epidemic," William said to me.
"They're angry. Their lives have been hard. Look at your sister, Vicky. She's working a dangerous job right now, because she has to. But she still can't get ahead." Then he said, "Lucy, people are in trouble. And those who aren't in trouble, they just don't get it. Look how I just didn't get it—being surprised that this Charlene woman was working in a food pantry. And also, we make the people who are in trouble feel stupid. It's not good."
At the very beginning of the movie was a blue screen with many white ping-pong balls bouncing around it, and every so often a ping-pong ball would bounce into another ping-pong ball and then bounce off again. This went on, the ping-pong balls bouncing around randomly and randomly hitting into one another. And in my memory I thought—even back then, so young—I thought: That is like people. My point is,if we are lucky we bounce into someone. But we always bounce away again, at least a little.
I had a sense then of being old, and William is even older; I thought how our time was almost done, and I had a real fear that William would die before me and I would be really lost.
We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.
It's funny the things we remember, even when we think we are not remembering well anymore.
The town was like a ghost town, but when William drove up to where the houses had been built for the millworkers, we saw a few people out in front of them. The houses were in terrible shape; they seemed to spew forth their guts onto their front lawns.
I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to a different person.
But my brother's life had been, and still was, one of great solitariness. And he would arrive in my mind sometimes, as he did this night. I remembered that years ago my mother had told me—Pete would have been a grown man at that point—that my brother would spend the night in the Pedersons' barn—this was a barn that was closest to us—to be with the pigs that were going to be taken to slaughter the next day.
and what I always remember is that my mother looked up at me and said with an odd smile, "Do you want some too?"
I also noticed how, in the afternoons, clouds might start to come in and they were gently autumnal; they made the world look quietly soft as though it was already getting ready to tuck itself in for the night.
There was a faint odor of loneliness that came from Charlene. And the awful truth is this: It had made me draw back just slightly inside myself. And I knew this was because I had always been afraid of giving off that odor myself.
I thought how when a person is really excited about something, it can be contagious.
As is true with many people who feel poorly, there was a sense of shame that accompanied this.
And I thought: We are only doing what we can to get through.
I have always been frightened of doing something wrong, of being inconsiderate; it is a real fear I have.
I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone.
But I have often thought that it made me a nicer person, I really do. When you are truly humbled, that can happen. I have come to notice this in life. You can become bigger or bitter, this is what I think. And as a result of that pain, I became bigger.
Because I would never have had an affair, I thought William would not either. I had been thinking like myself.
And there they were, my beautiful daughters. By the duck pond were my two girls. But they were never really mine, I thought as I walked toward them, any more than New York City was ever really mine.
And then I remembered that one time, when I was pregnant with Chrissy, I had looked down at my big stomach and put my hand over it and thought: Whoever you are, you do not belong to me. My job is to help you get into the world, but you do not belong to me.
Last words
And I stood there holding on to this man as though he were the very last person left on this sweet sad place that we call Earth.
From Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout comes a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown--and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart. "No novelist working today has Strout's extraordinary capacity for radical empathy. . . . May droves of readers come to feel enlarged, comforted, and genuinely uplifted by Lucy's story."--The Boston Globe With her trademark spare, crystalline prose--a voice infused with "intimate, fragile, desperate humanness" (The Washington Post)--Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through the early days of the pandemic. As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart--the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.
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With her trademark spare, crystalline prose—a voice infused with “intimate, fragile, desperate humanness” (The Washington Post)—Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through the early days of the pandemic.
As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea.
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart—the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.
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