“ My Name is Lucy Barton was a different kind of book for me, and writing it surprised me. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, book review. MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON is a short 200 page novella jam-packed with emotional substance. Nor do I mean those moments in which Lucy, recalling a loveless childhood in poverty on an isolated farm, slams on the brakes of her narrative as she stumbles on a memory she would rather not talk about now. 36 people found this helpful. My Name Is Lucy Barton--like all of Strout's fiction--is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it." It sounds like one of those inspirational survivor stories, of success against the odds, which are regularly packaged for mass consumption. Photo: Manuel Harlan. Photo: Matthew Murphy. Adapted by Rona Munro. “I still am not sure it’s a true memory,” Lucy says, after describing the sadistic public humiliation of her brother by her father on the streets of a small town. There's a veil of ambiguity over the whole novel that made me constantly question what I was reading. Through Lucy Barton, Strout has made a remarkable virtue of the novelist's trick - often missed - of telling enough but not too much. But “My Name Is Lucy Barton” is the story of a daughter who loved her mother, and that is a very different story. Review My Name Is Lucy Barton. my name is lucy barton by Elizabeth Strout ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2016 From Pulitzer Prize– winning Strout ( The Burgess Boys , 2013, etc. And I ‘My Name Is Lucy Barton’ Review: Portrait of Perseverance Laura Linney stars in a solo show about a woman who overcomes a mysterious illness, an abusive childhood and an emotionally absent mother. • To order My Name Is Lucy Barton for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. It is the silences, the ellipses in conversations that articulate the emotional truths of relationships. And they of course aren’t the whole truth. My Name is Lucy Barton does not conform to any of the conventional ideas about dramatic structure. Elizabeth Strout’s atmospheric novel, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” comes to the stage as a glum, gray dud. The title character of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” Rona Munro’s crystalline stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, is hardly a woman of mystery. Review: Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton is an exploration of memory. 7 June 2018 4 Stars Book Now. The novel – narrated by the protagonist from the vantage point of the future, both with the benefit of hindsight and the unreliability of memory – takes places over five nights in the mid-1980s. Ideally cast as a plain-spoken woman made of quiet steel, she acts the way Elizabeth Strout writes in this compelling adaptation of the 2016 novel. Laura Linney pours the breath of life into Broadway's My Name Is Lucy Barton, based on the novel by Olive Kitteridge author Elizabeth Strout. Lighting design by Peter Mumford. If … But aren’t we grateful for the alchemical, unquantifiable mix of factors that allows this woman — embodied by this actress, at this moment, in this place — to share with us so raptly what she knows, or even thinks she knows? Paul T Davies reviews Laura Linney in My Name Is Lucy Barton now playing at the Bridge Theatre Laura Linney in My Name Is Lucy Barton. Given My Name Is Lucy Barton's distinguished literary cache and the casting of Linney to narrate Lucy's story the staged monologue Rona Munro has fashioned from its source had me arrive at the Friedman with high hopes that it would display sturdy enough theatrical legs to add it to my memory book of genuinely stage-worthy solo plays. Lucy did not, though. That’s one of its signal strengths. The Bridge Theatre. But Lucy conveys an abiding air of surprise that all this happened to her. “Except I do know it, I think. ), Linney and Strout, in contrast, are almost seamlessly well-matched. The caricature in the imitation underscores the distance between what Lucy came from and what she has become. It doesn’t flop hard — with its limited ambition, it has no height from which to fall. I mean: It is true …” That final affirmation rings slightly hollow. ‘Lucy Barton’ Review: Laura Linney Finds Her Perfect Match. But she is also possessed of an underlying strength that knows that she has had what it takes to not only endure but prevail. Back by popular demand, the show returned to the London stage in 2019, and will be making its Broadway debut in January 2020. Tickets Through Feb. 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater; manhattantheatreclub.com. You will have only one.”. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Still, My Name Is Lucy Barton is much larger and far more resonant than the sum of these parts. She is separated from her husband and two daughters, aged five and six, whom she misses desperately. Published: 11 Dec 2016 My Name Is Lucy Barton review – unspoken truths and new beginnings. What a relief to be in the company, for once, of a thoroughly reliable narrator. And though she begins reluctantly, Lucy’s mother turns out to be a corn country Scheherazade, with successive stories of local women who aspired above their station and usually came to bad ends. Plays adapted as monologues from memoirs and close first-person fiction are seldom satisfying onstage. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter,” says one of the characters in this novel. Manuel Harlan. In the scenes that follow, Lucy often becomes her mother — or rather Linney becomes Lucy becoming her mother. It is also the work of a more mature writer, scaling new heights. It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one ― Newsday. But her slender, tremendously affecting 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, is as direct, deceptively straightforward and singularly focused as its title implies. But her slender, tremendously affecting 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, is as direct, deceptively straightforward and singularly focused as its title implies. Elizabeth Strout’s considerable emotional insight illuminates this story of a mother-daughter relationship that needs to change… Natasha Tripney. (When the great actress Vanessa Redgrave performed the great writer Joan Didion’s memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” on Broadway, the result wasn’t a doubled greatness, but a dilution of the singular strengths of each. This is where many years ago, a younger Lucy spent nearly nine weeks of her existence, with a life-threatening infection that is never fully identified. And using the artfully shaded directness she has shown both on film (“You Can Count on Me”) and stage (“Sight Unseen,” “The Little Foxes”), Linney indeed acts the way that Strout writes. The setting of the play is largely a hospital room, evoked in Bob Crowley’s set by little more than an institutional chair and bed, with transformative lighting by Peter Mumford. My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. Strout avoids sentimentality by imbuing Lucy's narrative with a pervasive sense of uncertainty Oh, I was happy speaking with my mother this way!”. by Elizabeth Strout. They are familiar tales and yet utterly distinctive from one another, with startling details that suggest the perversity of flailing souls who misread their own intentions. . But what Linney is being asked to do here is to embody not only a fictional person but also the literary voice that shaped that person. The story begins with Lucy, now a published fiction writer, remembering a time, 20 or more years ago, when she was felled by an undiagnosable disease, a sort of visitation of sickness, and ended up in a New York City hospital for a prolonged stay. It doesn’t flop hard — with its limited ambition, it has no height from which to fall. Sound design by John Leonard. Yet, it sometimes feels rudderless. Because of course we can’t know the full truth of any person, including our own self. ... My Name is Lucy Barton review: Laura Linney is compelling and careful in one-woman show. Her mother echoes, “People.” It’s a gorgeous moment of fleeting complicity between mother and daughter. (Video design by Luke Halls, which turns the hospital window into an aperture onto a hazy past, is fine, though I could have done without the intrusive melancholy music.). My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. My Name Is Lucy Barton. It's clear that Lucy's mother, Lydia, remembers certain things very … Not only does her illness afford her nine weeks of daily visits from a kindly Jewish doctor “to whom I felt a deep attachment”, it brings her mother rushing to her bedside, with the possibility not just of reconciliation, but of cure: “Her being there, using my pet name, which I had not heard in ages, made me feel warm and liquid-filled, as though all my tension had been a solid thing and now was not.” With her mother holding vigil, Lucy is relieved of the insomnia that has plagued her in hospital: “That night I slept without waking, and in the morning my mother was sitting where she had been the day before.”, Lucy may be hoping for an emotional reunion, but her mother embarks on a series of anecdotes about people they once knew – friends, relations, acquaintances – whose failed marriages and emotional breakdowns are recounted like cautionary morality tales. Manuel Harlan. Her trajectory from childhood to college, to marriage and motherhood, and ultimately to a career as a successful fiction writer, is fairly conventional in summary. • My Name Is Lucy Barton is published Viking (£12.99). Transforming My Name Is Lucy Barton from page to stage in such engrossing manner is quite a feat on the part of the actor, as well as Strout, Munro, and Eyre. ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’: Theater Review Laura Linney reprises her starring role in the one-person play that premiered in London last year. Open this photo in gallery: The new novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, shown in … “My Name Is Lucy Barton” — like all of Strout’s fiction — is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it. Praise for My Name Is Lucy Barton “A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”—The Boston Globe “It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful.” Give her time; she’ll come back to it. My Name Is Lucy Barton confirms Strout as a powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships, weaving family tapestries with compassion, wisdom and insight. Laura Linney pours the breath of life into Broadway's My Name Is Lucy Barton, based on the novel by Olive Kitteridge author Elizabeth Strout. Lucy’s mother is unable to tell her daughter she loves her except “when your eyes are closed” and there is a quietly devastating tragedy about the way Lucy endeavours to make peace with this: “I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you… It was all right.” And yet this is a novel about love: about the complicated, complex love between a mother and daughter. As for subjects closer to their Amgash, Ill., home, especially Lucy’s tormented father, her mother sidesteps those with discomfort and disapproval. Don’t ever worry about story. Also My Name is Lucy Barton suggests that watching one character ruminate a bout her life following a mysterious illness can catalyze an audience’s own personal reflections and revelations; in this sense, it’s profound. From the Author. Lucy Barton has been in hospital for three weeks with an undiagnosed illness after having her appendix removed. The title character of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” Rona Munro’s crystalline stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, is hardly a woman of mystery. Read it. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. ), a short, stark novel about the ways we break and maintain the bonds of family. 36 people found this helpful. --San Francisco Chronicle "A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . Aside to Elizabeth Strout: YOU are a ruthless writer! See all 1,210 critical reviews › RunSueRun. This means that the truths she is telling hurt — us and her. Feelings seem to register on her face before her thoughts have a chance to catch up with them, so that we know when she’s hurting or happy almost before she does. This review is from June 2018. When Lucy speaks as her mother, it’s with a sort of descriptive physical shorthand, conjuring sharp edges and a nasal twang. Linney’s presence here is deferential, almost shy. As a storyteller, Strout’s Lucy is almost apologetic in her humility. Her hospitalization reunites her with the mother she hasn’t seen in years. My Name is Lucy is published by Viking, £11.99. To order a copy for £10.39 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. In Elizabeth Strout’s deeply affecting novel, the eponymous heroine endeavours to make sense of her story in spite of the vagaries of memory, the power of collective denial and the masterful ability of those closest to her to shroud her emotional needs in misunderstandings and repression. This is true even when your primary sources are your own heart and mind. My Name Is Lucy Barton tells the story of a woman, named Lucy, as she recovers from an illness and tries to make sense of/peace with her complicated relationship with her mother. Emotions are carefully measured and sentimentality is in short supply in My Name Is Lucy Barton, the very fine (and very faithful) stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s mother-daughter–focused novel. I’m not referring to the classic suspense-making withholding of information that is usually a requisite of entertaining storytelling. 1/12 My Name is Lucy Barton - in pictures. Lucy was raised in extreme poverty by parents who were not able to nurture and show her love in the manner that most children need. And I My Name is Lucy Barton, Bridge Theatre, London, review: Laura Linney is luminous in this one-woman show. Top critical review. Christina Patterson. My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short, sparse novel and every word, every incident related is carefully chosen. Unexpectedly, her mother, from whom she has been estranged for years, arrives at her bedside. But when Lucy says she has become ruthless — as those who first knew she wanted to be a writer advised her she would have to be — we believe her. Directed by Richard Eyre. This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. Do read "My Name Is Lucy Barton" first to fully appreciate "Anything Is Possible." Read it. Do read "My Name Is Lucy Barton" first to fully appreciate "Anything Is Possible." Strout conveys immense poignancy in the solace Lucy manages to take from these interactions nonetheless: “I was so happy. Video design by Luke Halls. My Name is Lucy Barton - in pictures. It is also the work of a more mature writer, scaling new heights. Other actresses have beautifully portrayed Strout characters onscreen, notably Frances McDormand in “Olive Kitteridge.”. My Name is Lucy Barton is a 2016 New York Times bestselling novel and the fifth novel by the American writer Elizabeth Strout. More more on … But now, in extremis, all Lucy wants is mommy, and she wants mommy to tell her stories. And yet mystery — truly unfathomable and utterly ordinary — is at the center of this deceptively modest Manhattan Theater Club production, which originated in London and is directed with quiet care by Richard Eyre. The magic that pulses in a book can disintegrate when these same words are interpreted by a performer who isn’t, as it were, on the same page. It's clear that Lucy's mother, Lydia, remembers certain things very differently to the way Lucy does. Video projections and changes in lighting transform the hospital-room set into scenes from Lucy Barton’s Illinois childhood. While I hope for all my books to provide the reader with a kind of intimate experience this one seems particularly available for that, I think. Reviewed by Fiona Mountford; Thursday 7 June 2018 08:00 This review is from June 2018. Elizabeth Strout: ‘a storyteller immersed in the nuances of relationships’. . My Name is Lucy Barton. My Name is Lucy Barton - in pictures. Lucy is now a successful writer, but her mother’s presence reignites memories of her childhood – of poverty, abuse and social exclusion: “We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois.”, The descriptions of Lucy’s formative years are visceral and heartbreaking. Theatre Review by Howard Miller - January 15, 2020. Read more. Elizabeth Strout’s atmospheric novel, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” comes to the stage as a glum, gray dud. That’s part of what makes life so sad; it is an even larger part of what makes life so wondrously fascinating. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, book review. Every breath of Linney’s performance acknowledges this contradiction. My Name Is Lucy Barton, from 2016, much admired by some, was too arid for my taste, its self-pitying heroine too unpleasant. There is a profound isolation to the title character, played by Laura Linney, in the Broadway solo play My Name Is Lucy Barton.. “In spite of my … Why? Cast: Laura Linney. It is for her daughter to fill in those gaps for us, with accounts of the kind of numbing, oppressive and outright abusive existence that so many people accept as a life sentence. Click here to order a copy for £10.39, An exploration of the love between mother and daughter is both affecting and wise, Olive Kitteridge box set review – a darkly knotted mess of lust, crime, affairs and heartbreak. 2/12 My Name is Lucy Barton - in pictures. “People,” Lucy says, wonderingly, after her mother finishes an anecdote about a runaway wife. But Lucy also knows that full transparency does not equal full knowledge. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short, sparse novel and every word, every incident related is carefully chosen. Scenic and costumes design by Bob Crowley. Laura Linney as a New York writer recalling her past in “My Name Is Lucy Barton” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Read more. Through Lucy Barton, Strout has made a remarkable virtue of the novelist's trick - often missed - of telling enough but not too much. Top critical review. My Name Is Lucy Barton confirms Strout as a powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships, weaving family tapestries with compassion, wisdom and insight. This is an important distinction to make, since Linney is not trying to create another, autonomous character here. Aside to Elizabeth Strout: YOU are a ruthless writer! There's a veil of ambiguity over the whole novel that made me constantly question what I was reading. A New York writer who grew up in rural Illinois, Lucy Barton is surely someone we can trust to speak plain. On the contrary, as embodied with middle-American forthrightness by a perfectly cast Laura Linney, in the production that opened Wednesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Lucy may be the most translucent figure now on a New York stage. Aside to Everyone Else: Read the book, and you will know why this is a compliment. It's a story of a daughter who so loves her mother despite her unpleasant childhood, a daughter who so wants the approval and love of her mother in return. The sense of isolation is palpable and Strout creates a tragic portrayal of a lifetime’s loneliness: “Loneliness was the first flavour I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden in the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.” It is this loneliness, Lucy confides to the reader, that prompted her to become a writer: “Books made me feel less alone… I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone!”, You wonder if Lucy’s medical condition, undiagnosed throughout the novel, might be psychosomatic; in another setting, she could be the perfect subject for a Freudian case study on hysteria. Reviewed Jan. 11. Elizabeth Strout’s bestselling novel “My Name Is Lucy Barton” looks, at first glance, like a curious choice for a theatrical adaptation. ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’: Theater Review Manhattan Theater Club; Samuel J. Friedman Theater; 646 seats; $179 top. From the moment she enters, walking quickly and talking briskly, you sense that it requires conscious, self-preaching will power for her to tell us all this. Strout’s lack of sentimentality creates a powerful image of a childhood steeped not just in financial hardship, but in cultural and emotional deprivation: Lucy’s is a childhood devoid of books, magazines, TV, neighbours. When Lucy says, with a satisfaction that’s bigger than happiness, that “all life amazes me,” we feel exactly what she means. 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