So far, the narrator has only offered us at intervals the details of how miserable her childhood was. I began to try.’ This is why it feels like a good place to take stock. At the point I’ve stopped reading, on page 99 of a 190-odd-page novel, we get this: ‘And so I began to record this story on that night. We know that this book is not the first thing written by the narrator, and it’s becoming clear that she, or Elizabeth Strout, is interested in how stories are told. The half-way point seems like a good place to pause. What is it about names in this book? And I’m still wondering about the untypical sense of pride we can hear in that title. The only person important enough for that honour is an author Lucy meets, and who gives her the idea of becoming a real writer. But the doctor Lucy likes, the teacher who was kind to her, the artist lover at university who wasn’t – none of these get names. Her siblings, her husband, her own children… they all have names, as do the girls the family used to know who have life-stories that Lucy’s mother likes to tell. We never get to know her mother’s name, or her father’s, but most other people’s we do. From then on she always uses a nickname, Wizzle. We don’t know for certain that it’s Lucy who is actually narrating until her mother calls her by her name, once, when she arrives to see her after a gap of something like ten years. ‘My Name is Lucy Barton,’ says – nobody in this short novel.
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