An Exclusive Waterstones Q & A with Elizabeth Strout

Photo: Elizabeth Strout (c) Leonard Cendamo

In My Name is Lucy Barton, the difficult relationship between parents and children is a theme that runs throughout the book. What is it about this relationship that draws you back again and again? To what extent do you think portraying parental emotion, particularly maternal emotion, ambiguously is one of the last taboos in fiction?

I really don’t know what draws me to write about parental relationships, but they are so complicated that they seem to be to be a writer’s dream, because life is messy, and to capture that messiness on the page has always appealed to me.  Whether or not this remains one of the last taboos in fiction, I couldn’t say.
   

I suppose I am drawn to physical frailty because I am drawn to the vulnerabilities of people.  People are more themselves at these points it seems to me, and that makes for good fiction.
   

To capture the essence of memory is very important to me as a writer because memory is so unstable.  We think we remember things, but do we really?  And yet even if the memory is not true, it came from somewhere in the character and that is interesting to me.
   

Well, this goes to the answer above.  There are so many things we don’t say – or can’t say.  As a fiction writer I think it is my job to get across those things we can’t – or choose not to – say.  This is not easy, but it is the fun part of my job, to do what I can.
   

Wharton’s novels are very explicit about the individual against society.  I think I do a similar thing, but my society that I write about is, for the most part, very different from Wharton’s.  She wrote at a different period in history.  And time and place – with the injection of character – make a story what it is.
   

In my experience publishers are keen to pigeon-hole things as either stories or a novel, and in my case I write them both at once.  I do this organically, it arrives from the way I think or see; in Olive Kitteridge I understood her story needed to be told episodically and so I arrived at that form.
   

I’m so glad you think there is humor in my work – I think there are hilarious things in my work.  Often, I suppose, I use things I have observed personally, but I always put them in the mouths of my made-up characters and so they become immediately fiction.  Also, I make up things as I work, so I may very well use things that come straight from my head as I watch my characters perform.
   

This is in fact one way that I am like Lucy Barton: I do write so that people will feel less alone.  But I would go further than Lucy:  I write so that people can also see others, can understand hopefully – even briefly – what it means to be another person, and this can make them more empathic.  This is my hope.

Often as readers we are observers of deeply private, intimate moments for your characters –observing them at their most vulnerable. How much do you see the novel as a form of confessional with the reader as a privileged confessor?

I don’t think of my work in terms of being confessional, but I can see what you mean by that.  I think of my work as going into the dark crevices of the mind and showing others that what they have thought and felt – so privately – have most likely been thought and felt by others before.
   

I’ve read that your next novel is something of a ‘companion piece’ to My Name is Lucy Barton, what drew you to return to these characters again? Did you always know that there were other stories here you couldn’t leave untold?

When I was writing about Lucy Barton and her mother, watching them speak of people from their hometown, I immediately became interested in those people and understood right away that they would have their turn, their own stories told.