"So much of life seems speculation," writes Elizabeth Strout in a novel that wrestles with trauma and familial relationships from the perspective of a young mother hospitalized in Greenwich Village during the 1980s. It also describes the birth of a writer who speculates very little, preferring to examine instead her own reactions to the world. Lucy appreciates her physician's kindness instead of trying to explain it and, thanks to advice given to her by a successful novelist, she accepts that she has but one story to tell, and that she will continue to tell it over and over again in different ways.
I couldn't agree more. For me, that one story would have been my inability to come out to my father. Lucy's story--one of poverty and abuse--is more horrifying than that, yet our fathers were contemporaries, and Lucy's father rejection of her gay brother is exactly what I feared most for my first 39 years and provides the central theme of my own unproduced play and unpublished memoir.
With just a couple of deft strokes, Strout also captures the tenuousness of gay life during the AIDS epidemic. During her long confinement in the hospital, her upstairs neighbor, a cultured, single Frenchman who insists writers must be "ruthless," disappears. True to the advice she's been given, Lucy never has speculated about his sexuality but suddenly puts the pieces together while "the gaunt and bony men continue to walk by."
I'll bet if I were a woman, I would have given this novel five stars.
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