Elizabeth Strout had just finished writing her Booker-shortlisted novel Oh William!, revisiting her much loved character Lucy Barton, when the pandemic struck. Now, barely a year later, we have Lucy by the Sea, another in the series, which follows Lucy and her former husband William as they flee New York for a damp house in New England, to sit out the pandemic. “Lucy and William were just so much in my head. I thought: OK, let’s have him take her up to the coast of Maine, and stick them on this cliff and see what happens,” Strout says from her house in Brunswick, Maine, which she and her husband have made their permanent home since lockdown. The two novels “work together”, she says. “I see them as a continuation of each other.”
Since My Name Is Lucy Barton in 2016, which introduced us to Lucy and her estranged mother, and the extreme poverty of her childhood, Strout has written another four books – quite a sprint for a writer who published her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, when she was 43, waiting another eight years before a follow-up, Abide With Me. While both were critically acclaimed, it was with her third novel, Olive Kitteridge, about a retired school teacher in Maine, that her career really took off. Her prickly, no-nonsense heroine with a fondness for proclaiming “Hell’s bells!” became an unlikely hit and byword for a kind of New England melancholy orneriness. The novel won a Pulitzer prize in 2009 and resulted in a devoted readership, helped along by an Emmy-winning HBO series starring Frances McDormand. Olive’s many fans will be delighted to know she pops up in this new novel (she’s now in a retirement home) inspiring another shoe-stealing stunt.
Strout describes her writing style as that of “an embroiderer” – “I will pick it up and embroider a little green line, and come back later and embroider a leaf or something” – and her novels, intricately and painstakingly crafted, overlap and intertwine to create an instantly recognisable fictional landscape. “I did not set out to have a career peopled with the same characters,” she says. “But these people are so real to me that I keep wanting to write about them in their new situations or where they might be now, so I just keep going back to them.”
You don’t so much read a Strout novel as inhabit it, an experience that lasts much longer than the time it takes to read each slim volume. Her quiet, artfully artless stories about unassuming characters are loved by readers and fellow writers alike (Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith and Jennifer Egan are all admirers). With her blond hair in a wispy up-do, glasses and habit of elegantly gesturing with her hands, she looks like Hollywood’s idea of a writer – think Meryl Streep, or Laura Linney, who played Lucy in the one-woman Broadway adaptation of My Name Is Lucy Barton. It was Linney, in fact, who unwittingly inspired Strout’s previous novel, when during a rehearsal the author attended, she put her glasses on her head and murmured: “Oh William!” to herself. “I just thought, ‘Oh, William!’” Strout says now. “And I realised, he’s got his story.”
She speaks the same way as she writes, sparely and elliptically – you can feel the pressure between the lines, as she put it in a recent exchange on writing with the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante – even down to those breathless exclamation marks, which few modern writers would dare use without irony. She often answers questions with her musical laugh or an “Exactly!”, so that you aren’t quite sure what, if anything, she is agreeing to, in a manner similar to Lucy’s beguiling mix of declaration and evasion. For the record, Barton is not Strout, although there are many similarities: they are the same age (66), both writers, twice married with grown-up daughters (Strout one, Barton two) living between Maine and Manhattan. “We share many traits, but I’m not her,” she says, slightly wearily. “At this point in my life, I don’t care so much about what people think, so if people think that, that’s fine. But it is not true.”
Lockdown seems a perfect Stroutian setup, as nearly all her novels take place in enclosed worlds: small towns in Maine or the midwest, or the hospital room of My Name Is Lucy Barton; her subject is loneliness and isolation. The greatest departure of Lucy by the Sea is that it is written almost in real time, documenting that first year of the pandemic from early uncertainty to vaccination. Strout wanted to capture the way in which “time just imploded”, she says. “There was no time, all the days just melded into one. I was trying to get that sense of disorientation on to the page.”
But where previous Strout novels exist in seclusion from the real world, here she found that external events crept in – notably the killing of George Floyd and the storming of the Capitol. “That was very new for me,” she says. “But when I began the book, I understood that we were living through a historical time and that I was going to try and record that. And then when these other events happened, I thought, ‘I have to record them as well because I can’t not, I can’t avoid it.’ So for the first time in my life, I had to address things straight on like that. It was strange and it was difficult.” There is one telling omission: “There is not the word ‘Trump’ in that book,” Strout confirms proudly.
There is a pervasive disquiet throughout the novel beneath the immediate worries about the virus. “I do feel that we’re in a desperate place,” she says. “It’s a very anxious time to be an American.” Spending time in both New York and Maine, Strout is acutely aware of the divisions in her country. She has a real fear of the possibility of a civil war. “I actually mean violence,” she says. “There’s a quiet rumbling. We just don’t know where it will go. Is it going to expand and explode? Or will it sort of go along like other parts of American history have in the past? Watching the news, some days I feel like, ‘OK, we’ll make it through this.’ And then other days I think, ‘Well, we might not.’”
As always, Strout is at pains to be “fair handed and open-hearted” in her fiction. Lucy becomes fascinated by a policeman in his 50s she sees on one of her rare trips into town and starts to write a short story. But once she has finished it, she realises that a story about “a white cop who was sympathetic to the old president and who does an act of violence and gets away with it” might be misunderstood, and decides not to publish it. “I knew that many people understood what was right and wrong, but these days I could not understand that myself,” Lucy reflects. “That’s a real commentary on the times that we’re living in,” Strout says. In terms of cancel culture? “Exactly.” As a writer who likes “to write against the grain”, she is more aware of not causing offence than she used to be, and “I don’t like to be aware of anything when I’m writing”.
Thinking back to childhood, she describes herself as “chatty” and “dripping in emotion”, both characteristics at odds with her rather joyless Congregationalist upbringing: her parents “came from many generations of New Englanders and they had a sceptical view of pleasure”, she has written. Both were professors (her father was a parasitologist – like William; her mother taught English), and while the family were by no means wealthy, they were not poor like Lucy’s. “Lucy’s background was really very vividly awful,” she stresses.
There were no newspapers or television in their house, as in Lucy’s, but not because Strout’s family couldn’t afford them – they did have science magazines and the New Yorker. The first book she read when she was seven or eight was John Updike’s short story collection Pigeon Feathers. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, there’s a lot that goes on in grownups’ lives,’” she says. “It made me understand that being a child was not where it was happening.” Her father, who died just over 20 years ago, was “very warm and loving”; her mother not so much. “My mother didn’t like children’s books. My mother didn’t like children,” she says.
Although she describes her mother as “a difficult woman”, Strout is keen to make clear that she was never the model for Olive Kitteridge, though the novel is dedicated to her (she is 95). “My mother is not even remotely Olive Kitteridge,” she says. Tricky maternal relationships run like a scar throughout her work, from Amy and Isabelle to My Name Is Lucy Barton, which few novels can rival as a portrait of mother-daughter toxicity. Yet “Lucy finds it enormously restorative to be able to love her daughters so deeply and to care for them in the way that she was never cared for,” Strout says.
After graduating from Bates, a liberal college in Maine, and following a dismal year in Oxford, England, she enrolled at law school in Syracuse. While her six month-law career might have been doomed – “I was a terrible lawyer” – it took her many years to realise that her legal training helped turn her into a writer. “You have to strip away emotion,” she explains. “The most fascinating part of a case for me was always the statement of facts, because it’s a little short story. They were told quickly and abruptly, no sense of feeling because you’re just getting in there to state the facts. To study the law was actually good for me, because otherwise it was just a mass of jiggly emotions.”
During the wilderness years, when she took any number of jobs – as a secretary, a cocktail waiter, selling mattresses in a department store – while bringing up her daughter, Zarina, from her first marriage, she was always writing. “Even back when I was getting rejected, I was always writing for a reader, I was writing to connect with somebody. I have never, ever written for myself,” she says emphatically, recalling Lucy’s steely admission in the first book: “I took myself – secretly, secretly – very seriously! I knew I was a writer.”
“Please let this book just reach one person,” she would think while finishing Amy and Isabelle, imagining a young woman in a library in the midwest pulling it off the shelf one day, hoping “it would bring her something that she didn’t know she needed”. Never mind the Pulitzer and the plaudits, she’s just “so glad” to have found her readers, she says. “That’s what I wanted to do, and I’ve done it.”
Then came Olive Kitteridge, who connected with people in a way Strout could never have dreamed of. She just “showed up” one day while Strout was loading the dishwasher, “and I realised, OK, I’m gonna get this down”. Lucy’s voice also just came to her, when she was lying in bed. But this idea of her characters magically “popping up” is not to deny the years of apprenticeship: when they appeared, Strout was ready for them. Behind every one of her pared-down, apparently effortless lines is the weight of 10,000 hours – and more. “I was training myself for years to find my voice, or Lucy’s voice, or my Elizabeth Strout voice and the right sentences,” she says. “I had to learn to stop writing like a writer and to write like me. And that seemed to take me a long time.”
Strout’s counterpart in contemporary fiction might be Marilynne Robinson, whose similarly gentle midwestern novels are concerned with pinning down that part of the American psyche borne of its Calvinist past. But unlike Robinson, who writes from lifelong belief, Strout has rejected her austere Congregationalist roots. “That’s where I come from. It’s one of the oldest things in this country. It started with all the zealots leaving England and then they moved over here and became Puritans. There are certain parts of it that are just so tiresome to me that I’m ready to see it move on.”
In a twist that might have come straight out of a Strout novel, the author met her second husband, James Tierney, a former Maine attorney general and state legislator, when he attended a reading in New York not long after the publication of Olive Kitteridge. He stood up and announced he was from Lisbon Falls in Maine before asking a question. After a couple of dates, they moved in together and married a year later. “Yeah. I know. It’s a wonderful story,” she agrees. “It’s pretty great.” But it also means she is back in Maine, living 20 minutes from where she grew up. “It’s horrible!” she deadpans. “I worked very hard to get myself out of Maine.”
While Maine might be in her DNA, viewing this particular stretch of coastline through the eyes of Lucy, who grew up in Illinois, has helped her see it afresh. “I realised, this is a really pretty place up here. There’s a lot of beauty that I’ve been missing, because it was just so familiar to me.”
Does it feel like home? She laughs. “Well, let’s just say nothing ever feels like home to me. I have home issues. But my husband is here and home is where my husband is.” There’s no danger of them giving up their studio in New York. So she still sees herself as somewhere in between: “Oh my goodness. Yes!” Manhattan is also home to Zarina, now a playwright. “She’s darling! Oh, I just love her so much,” Strout exclaims, clutching her hands to her heart, in a line that might have come straight from the new novel.
She is always reluctant to discuss work in progress, but it is safe to say we haven’t heard the last from Lucy. Or even possibly the redoubtable Olive Kitteridge, retirement home or not: “Don’t underestimate Olive!” she laughs.
“I love to write,” she says simply. “I want to connect with somebody so that they can see their life in a different way even just for two minutes, or have some momentary sense of transcendence, as though the roof were a little higher for a few minutes. And they can look around and they can say, ‘Oh, right, it’s just life, it’s just life.’”
• Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy By the Sea will be published on 6 October by Viking. To support the Guardian and the Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
