Elizabeth Strout didn’t bat an eyelash when she admitted that I broke the toilet handle in the agent’s bathroom shortly after I met her. I did—my plumbing skills are quiet and efficient—but knowing the cast of characters honest to the faults circulating through Strout’s novels, I had a hunch she would appreciate my candor. did.
What I didn’t expect was Strout’s disarming laughter. That voice filled her House of Friedrich her Agency book-lined muse Upper her West her side and caused a dimple on her right cheek. Over the next 90 minutes of her, I witnessed this chain reaction dozens of times. Suppose an interviewer would struggle to find another subject that combines Strout’s gaiety and solemnity.
We met to discuss Strout’s ninth book, Lucy by the Sea. This follows Lucy Barton, a writer featured in her previous novels, in the first year of the pandemic, until she fled New York City to isolate with her ex-husband. , William, in a rented house in Maine. There’s a bittersweet immediacy, as if Strout got to work the day Tom Hanks announced he was infected, but somehow Covid can be kept in the backseat. Lucy Burton at the wheel. with William riding a shotgun and using Strout’s voice to navigate the getaway car.
If you’ve been following Strout’s output, you may have noticed that she’s doing well. Slow at first, then steadily, then at breakneck pace, Strout built a universe of flawed, cranky, and vulnerable people.
“Lucy by the Sea” will be released by Random House on September 20th, less than a year after the Booker Prize-nominated semi-prequel “Oh William!” In 2019, Oprah gave a nod to “Olive, Again,” the sequel to “Olive Kitterridge,” which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize and became her HBO series starring Frances McDormand. “Anything Is Possible” was released in 2017. “My Name Is Lucy Barton” was released in 2016.
“As I got older, I taught myself how to put these sentences down, how to know when it was worth putting them down,” Strout, 66, said. Life, and now acceleration is happening. “
It actually took decades to gather this momentum. She published her first book, Amy and Isabel, when she was 42, and then spaced out her novels for eight years.
“Even when I was younger, I almost slipped into the person next to me,” she said. “I could or thought I could feel what it was like to be them. To calm that feeling, I had to teach myself to write.”
Strout, who will almost certainly be played in the Diane Keaton biopic Something’s Gotta Give, grew up in New Hampshire and Maine. After she graduated from her college at Bates in 1977, she waited tables in Lewiston, Maine for several years. here. ‘”
She tried law school, dropped out, went back and graduated with honors, but after six months of her legal career found herself unfit to be a lawyer.
All the while, Strout worked on stories and novels that never got published.
The Syracuse University College of Law, where she earned her degree, had a writing program and spent more time with writers than law students.
“What surprised me about these writer friends is that they talked about writing a lot, but they didn’t actually write as much. They didn’t write as many songs as I did.” ‘ said Strout.
In 1983, Strout moved to New York City with her first husband and young daughter. Not long after that, she met Kathy Chamberlain at New Her School and she took her one of two writing courses. Another of hers was Gordon Riche’s course at Columbia University. Nearly 40 years later, Chamberlain is still her first reader.
“When Liz read her first story, we had to go up to the table in front of the room and I was like, ‘This is magic, this is a real writer.’ said Chamberlain, who is also a writer. “She can create more than the words on the page.”
“Amy and Isabel” was released in 1998. The experience was overwhelmed by the experience of Manhattan where he was an adjunct lecturer in his college borough, “publishing stories here and there” and “working in obscurity for years.” “
“Me I knew that I was a writer, but I had no idea what it was like to be a writer,” Strout wrote in an email. But suddenly a big spotlight was directed there and it scared me.
Suzanne Berne reviewed the book for The New York Times, calling “Amy and Isabelle” “one of those rare and exhilarating books that peers into the familiar world with ruthless intimacy, revealing strange and surprising places.” ” was expressed.
The same is true of Strout’s work—words she probably doesn’t use in reference to herself. She does not write book reviews, and according to her husband James Tierney, whom she married in 2011, she “doesn’t indoctrinate about literary theory.”
“I don’t want to get involved with the different egos around the work,” Strout explained. “It’s not fun for me, and it intuitively feels bad for me.”
On how she approaches new ideas, she says: Do you have wax paper yet? My job is to make it as flat as possible. “
Strout continued, “If you’re using the crux of what I’ve experienced myself, I think it’s silly, but I think it’s a lump of bubblegum. Hmm.”
As for the tools of the trade, when I’m taking notes on a scene on the go, I use “just a notebook paper with three holes that fits in a binder, which I don’t have.” If she has a favorite pen, she didn’t mention it. Later she transfers her own writing to a computer.
Early in the pandemic, Strout and Tierney broke the monotony by taking a drive near their home in Brunswick, Maine. One of their favorite destinations was Bailey Island, about 25 minutes away. Past Bowdoin College, down a wooded road with sparkling water on both sides, cross a cribstone bridge onto a craggy piece of land that looks like a middle finger. Casco Bay.
There, she found a cottage on a cliff near a small beach where Strout used to jump rocks as a child.
“I told Jim that was the house Lucy and William were moving into,” she said. This is how ideas come to her. She then writes it down.
In “Lucy by the Sea,” the house is in Crosby, Maine, on Lake Wobegon in Strout, and appears in several of her novels, as well as a number of its inhabitants. (“She’s very liberal and talks about the president all the time. She just hates him,” a friend told Lucy.) and reunites with Bob Burgess when William marries Lucy. Ex-husband of one of the women with whom he had an affair.
If you’re a perfectionist, recurring characters are like old friends. But if you’re reading Strout’s novels for the first time, you don’t need to know his story back.
“Liz has been doing this kind of literary world-building since ‘Amy and Isabel,'” said Mollie Friedrich, Strout’s agent. “Lucy and William come out of the first page of ‘Lucy by the Sea,’ so you don’t have to start with ‘My name is Lucy Burton.'”
She compared Strout’s writing process to Picasso’s Blue Period painting The Ironing Woman. These sentences look simple. They are so simplified.
Benjamin Dreyer, executive managing editor and copy chief at Random House and longtime copy editor at Strout, said: She said, “No, I just know about this.” You can’t catch her with her inconsistencies or chronological issues. “
But don’t come to these books looking for a Subaru/Maine summer camp view with a lobster roll/designer roof rack. Rather than focusing on tourists posing outdoors in front of giant duck boots, Strout is more likely to write about the people who work at LL Bean’s Freeport branch. I am writing with the love, frustration, and concern in case of a pandemic.
Strout’s portrait of a divorced couple bound by worrying about two grown daughters illuminates a refreshingly unexplored angle of Covid. Lucy and William are neither young nor old. They are not in danger. They can and have the means to protect themselves, but their uncertainties and fears are real. jump off the page.
Tierney explained their daily lives while Strout worked on “Lucy by the Sea.” The two were severely isolated after watching the news. He was cooking and teaching classes at his Harvard School of Law via Zoom. Strout was on the couch, in the studio, whenever and wherever the scene hit her.
“Liz is happiest when she’s writing,” said Tierney. “She also plays the piano. These are two important parts of her life, and they are inseparable. She pays attention to the sound of every sentence, every paragraph, every word.”
Recalling their drive together, he described the sky as “perfectly, painfully clear in the first few months of the pandemic.”
“One of the biggest challenges was getting a sense of time,” Strout said of the 2020 era of grocery laundry. “It was as if time had exploded. The day felt strange, and the week felt even stranger. I wanted to write it down on the page somehow.”
When Lucy Barton takes a crazy day trip to see her daughters in Connecticut, she nails it (no hugs allowed). This often broke my heart as I realized I didn’t know when I last had a child. Maybe you say, “Honey, you’re too big to pick up,” or something like that. But never pick them up again.
Living with this pandemic has been like that. you didn’t know “