What Makes a quiet story... POWERFUL?

Reading Elizabeth Strout like a writer

---

Hi everyone,

As I mentioned here the other day, I’ve been on an Elizabeth Strout binge ever since the election. In part, that’s because her stories are quiet and feel genuinely honest, unlike so much of the duplicitous grandstanding that passes for reality throughout our culture and politics right now. It’s also because Strout’s work resounds with the calming and much needed wisdom of kindness and compassion. Whether writing in first or third person, Strout confides in the reader with unapologetic tenderness. Each of her ten books feels intensely private and safe, like a quiet conversation between trusted friends in the corner of a small, mostly deserted cafe on a rainy afternoon.

Is Your Novel or Memoir Confessing Trauma, or Confiding Truth?

Strout writes with the hush of intimacy and the confidence of a conjuror. She lures and bewitches, startles and misdirects, beguiles and confounds, all without raising her voice. Many characters never leave the house in her stories. Deaths and assaults happen offstage. No one is perfect, and a few characters are most definitely creepy, but even the assholes in an Elizabeth Strout story are truly, relatably human.

By the standards applied to most novels and memoirs published today, nothing much happens in most of Strout’s plots. Characters talk and think and remember and observe each other dealing with situations that feel familiar even when they aren’t. Drama is almost entirely understated. And yet, I find these books more enthralling than the most propulsive Gillian Flynn thriller. How can that be? Is it just my boring taste? Or, is Strout performing a literary magic trick that every serious writer should know?

I was thrilled to find a a writerly trail of bread crumbs that began to answer these questions in My Name is Lucy Barton. Today I decided to see where it led. Whether you write fiction or memoir, I hope you’ll find this exploration as important and inspiring as I have.

---

---

What did Lucy Barton learn?

My Name is Lucy Barton is a fictional memoir. At least, that’s what we’re led to believe when secondary characters refer to it in the second Lucy Barton novel, Oh, William. And since Lucy is a successful novelist who cares and thinks a great deal about writing, it seems fair to read her as an alter ego for Strout herself. So, when Lucy recalls the lessons she learned during a week-long writing workshop with a harried but earnestly encouraging author named Sarah Payne— lessons that made a profound impression on the then fledgling writer Lucy— I can’t help but feel that these just might be lessons Strout herself has taken to heart. More to the point, they function like a writer’s guide to Strout’s entire body of work.

All writing is relationship

The core lesson is implicit in the private tone of Lucy and Sarah’s conversation—and in all of Strout’s prose. Just as Sarah relates her candid thoughts to Lucy, so Strout relates her stories to the reader with profound trust and respect for the reader’s interest and ability to follow her heart and mind. This confiding tone allows the narrative to shift (seemingly) spontaneously between past and present incidents and thoughts, making associations that feel significant and new and therefore important. Such associations are the goal when friends divulge their deepest thoughts to each other, and they become the glue in the relationship we feel as readers with Strout’s characters.

When we talk about our lives with someone we honestly believe can help us stitch memory into meaning, there’s usually a starting point embedded in an event, and a loose overarching chronology, but otherwise the pattern of associations can appear almost random until it ultimately (ideally) reveals the logic of our choices and some portion of the truth about who we are. The truth that still and always will remain largely hidden from our consciousness.

This is also the way Strout’s stories operate. For underneath the relationship with the reader lies the urgent, fraught, and brutally honest relationship of the protagonists with themselves. And it’s this relationship, I think, that best explains the quiet power of Strout’s work.

From Lucy Barton to Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess to Charlie Macauley, Strout’s characters are as fiercely curious and insecure in their relationships with themselves as we all are. At some level, we’re all fascinated and terrified by the strange, inaccessible parts of ourselves, and most of us spend our lives hoping/wishing to find someone who can help us make peace with this strangeness. It’s why we crave love and friendship. It’s also why we turn to stories, why we read literature. And why we write literature. We long for the struggles and discoveries of fictional characters to show us who we are. To help secure our relationship with ourselves.

Elizabeth Strout’s stories make no apologies for this longing. They don’t bury it in sex or murder or sensational drama. They make it the main event. And the main mystery. Over and over and over, like a child who keeps lifting stones on the beach to see what treasures they might hide, Strout’s characters wonder aloud on the page what their interactions might reveal about them. For even those who have glancing contact can leave lasting impressions.