My Name is Lucy Barton

“This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.”

Lucy discusses a moment when she recalls a traumatic memory as an adult. She captures the paralyzing and disorienting nature of these moments. Lucy’s trauma affects her as an adult and influences her choices. Strout’s use of the collective “us” communicates this as a universal human experience.

“But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone. This is my point. And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone!”

As a child, Lucy navigates isolation, abuse, and unsafe living conditions. She escapes through her schoolwork and intense fascination with reading. Lucy’s call to write is one rooted in her traumatic childhood. Her writing serves an important role in her self-development as she confronts her painful past and processes her healing.

“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”

Lucy describes the loneliness that consumed her from childhood. Strout portrays loneliness as a flavor to help the reader visualize this feeling. Her illustration of loneliness as hidden flavors depicts how Lucy’s traumatic memories surprise and confuse her into adulthood.

“The scar was healing nicely. ‘Healing nicely,’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes, I know.’ And we’d smile because it seemed to mean something—that it was not the scar trying to keep me sick. The smile was our acknowledgment of something, is what I mean.”

Lucy’s doctor checks on her healing from her appendix removal surgery. Lucy’s scar represents her physical ailment and the emotional damage that haunts her into adulthood. A symbol of warmth, the doctor helps Lucy heal physically and emotionally through his kindness.

“How do we ever see something about our own self?”

Lucy’s mother comments on how Lucy has achieved success in life by just doing it. Lucy struggles to see how she has achieved success. Strout presents a rhetorical question that asks the reader to question how humans struggle to look inward. Throughout the novel, Lucy strengthens her ability to confront her past and reflect on her growth.

“But early on I saw this: You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.”

Lucy worries that her mother will leave her in the hospital. She reflects on how she feels anxious when going to the dentist. She offers the advice that worrying prolongs suffering and reflects on how the mind is controlled by factors outside of human control. The use of the second person “you” presents this advice as a command to the reader. Lucy struggles to control her thoughts as she confronts her traumatic history.

“Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that’s what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.”

Lucy alludes to a line from playwright Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire. Like Blanche DuBois, Lucy relies on the kindness of strangers to find the comfort and intimacy she does not receive from her family. Lucy learns to accept herself and heal from the past through relationships with strangers like Sarah, Jeremy, and the doctor.

“I have learned this: A person gets tired. The mind or the soul or whatever word we have for whatever is not just the body gets tired, and this, I have decided, is—usually, mostly—nature helping us.”

Lucy faces additional potential complications from her surgery. She feels exhausted from her long stint in the hospital and her slow healing. Strout’s inclusion of the word “soul” implies more than physical exhaustion. Lucy’s emotional exhaustion leads her to seek an end to the cycle of trauma that plagues her into adulthood.

“Pity us. I thought those words later, as I thought of my response when the guard told me the statue was upstairs. I thought, Pity us. We don’t mean to be so small. Pity us—it goes through my head a lot—Pity us all.”

Lucy returns to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view a sculpture depicting a starving man and his children who offer themselves to him as a sacrifice. Upon hearing that the sculpture has been moved into a special exhibit, Lucy feels pity. The “us” she refers to is all humans who empathize with the figure in the sculpture and the feelings of desperation illustrated in it. This highlights the universal experience of pain and despair that adds to the emotional weight of Lucy’s story.

“This is a story about love, you know that. This is a story of a man who has 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.”

Lucy meets with Sarah, a writer, for a private conference during a writing workshop. Sarah encourages Lucy and tells her that her work will be published one day. Sarah understands Lucy’s writing and summarizes the central message of Lucy’s work. Sarah sees Lucy’s central message as one of love for her family, particularly her mother. This moment encourages Lucy to keep writing, a choice that furthers her growth and healing.

“Because I remember him saying, ‘Button, you just don’t get it, do you?’ He meant I did not understand that I could be loved, was lovable. Very often he said that when we had a fight. He was the only man to call me ‘Button.’ But he was not the last to say the other: You just don’t get it, do you?”

Lucy fights with William, who tells Lucy that the central issue that she has is not believing she is worthy of being loved. Lucy’s lack of self-acceptance disrupts her ability to pursue writing ruthlessly and to connect with others around her. As the novel progresses, Lucy learns to believe herself worthy of love and, ultimately, chooses to live for herself.

“I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you. I feel that people may not understand: It was all right.”

On her mother’s last night in the hospital with her, Lucy jokingly asks her mother to tell her that she loves her. Her mother refuses to do it. Lucy clarifies for the reader that her mother struggled to tell her that she loved her and that Lucy has accepted this. Strout parallels this moment with Lucy’s final moments with her mother, where she declares her love for her mother openly and awaits her mother’s response. Throughout her life, Lucy seeks the approval and love of her mother. She learns throughout this novel to accept the reality of her mother’s limitations and to accept herself.

“But I could see that she was terrified, and I was terrified too. I have no idea if she kissed me goodbye, but I cannot think she would have. I have no memory of my mother ever kissing me.”

Lucy’s mother abruptly decides to leave Lucy alone at the hospital after additional complications seem to arise. The word terrified implies that Lucy’s mother fears Lucy may die and cannot handle the reality of what may happen. Lucy’s lack of memory of her mother ever kissing her demonstrates the lack of intimacy between them. Despite their time together in the hospital, Lucy’s mother continues to maintain an emotional distance from Lucy.

“‘You will have only one story,’ she had said. ‘You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.’”

Sarah offers advice to Lucy during her writing workshop. As Lucy’s mentor, Sarah provides Lucy with the guidance to confront her painful past through her writing. The “one story” she refers to is Lucy’s own story of trauma that influences everything in her life. The use of the second person “you” draws the reader into this moment and communicates a deeper lesson that applies to all of humanity.

“But I think: No one in this world comes from nothing.”

Lucy remembers meeting her mother-in-law, who introduces her as coming from nothing. While her mother-in-law refers to wealth, Lucy refers to the memories that plague all humans. She highlights the human experience of grappling with the past and its influence over one’s present and future. The universal experience of pain is a central theme of the novel.

I bent and kissed her hair, which was matted from her being sick and in bed. And then I turned and took my things, and I did not look back, but when I stepped through the door, I could not keep walking. I backed up without turning around. ‘Mommy, I love you!’ I called out. I was facing the hallway, but her bed was the closest to me, and she would have heard me, I am sure. I waited. There was no answer, no sound. I tell myself she heard me. I tell myself—I’ve told myself—this many times.”

Lucy says goodbye to her dying mother. She leaves her mother’s side at her mother’s request. This moment marks a pivotal turn for Lucy as she does not hesitate to express her emotions to her mother. Throughout her life, she resisted emotion due to her parents’ discomfort. In this moment, Lucy chooses to do what is most healing for herself, which begins her full transition.

“I flew to see him only days before he died, staying in the house I had not seen for so many years. It frightened me, the house, its smells and its smallness, and the fact that my father was so ill and my mother gone.”

Lucy returns home one last time to visit her father on his death bed one year after her mother’s death. She returns to the scene of her most traumatic moments and still feels afraid. Despite this fear, Lucy confronts her past. The death of her parents frees Lucy to take some control over her life and to pursue an independent life focused solely on her own happiness.

“I was really lost. I could not stop feeling panic, as if the Barton family, the five of us—off-kilter as we had been—was a structure over me I had not even known about until it ended.”

Lucy struggles to forge her own path after her parents’ deaths. She recognizes the power her parents held over her even in adulthood. This moment of confusion soon passes as Lucy begins a new life outside the confines of her trauma and unhappy marriage.

“But when I say ‘And for myself, I didn’t care,’ I mean this: that to be raised the way I was, with so little—only the inside of my head to call my own—I did not require much.”

Lucy divorces William and refuses to accept any money he offers her. Lucy begins to live independently for the first time in her life. She attributes her ability to live on little to her childhood. Lucy accepts how the past has shaped her and now owns the truth of where she has come from.

“But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.”

Lucy reflects on how she has followed the advice of her friend Jeremy and has been ruthless in her life. She sees her growth and how she has chosen herself by setting boundaries with her family and leaving her unhappy marriage. This contrasts with the timid Lucy, who first met Jeremy and could not call herself an artist. Throughout the novel, Lucy grows into an independent, ruthless woman who seeks her own happiness above all else.

“I think: This was the end of her childhood. The deaths, the smoke, the fear throughout the city and the country, the horrendous things that have happened in the world since then: Privately I think only of my daughter on that day. Never have I heard before or since that particular cry of her voice. Mommy.”

Lucy watches the events of 9/11 unfold on the television screen with her daughter Becka. Now fully an independent woman, Lucy sees how the world shapes her daughter. No longer viewing the world through the eyes of a child, Lucy recognizes her role as a parent. This solidifies Lucy’s healing as she works to comfort her daughter rather than seeking comfort from her own mother.

“But this is my story. And yet it is the story of many. It is Molla’s story, my college roommate’s, it may be the story of the Pretty Nicely Girls. Mommy. Mom! But this one is my story. This one. And my name is Lucy Barton.”

Lucy recognizes the universal nature of her story and how the other women around her also struggle in their relationships with their mothers. Strout includes the title of the novel in this excerpt. The declaration of “my name is Lucy Barton” reflects Lucy’s ownership of her story. No longer afraid to confront the harsh reality of her childhood, Lucy emerges confident in her identity.

“But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”

Lucy reflects on the inner child that exists in every human who holds onto their trauma. Strout uses the collective “we” to capture the universal nature of this experience. Lucy’s experiences with trauma reflect a greater human journey in search of freedom from the trauma that haunts us.