Oh William! | Elizabeth Strout

_{I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William.}

Laura Linney played Lucy Barton in a one woman show, first in London, then on Broadway. A comment during rehearsal one day about William (Lucy’s first husband), made Elizabeth Strout realise that William had his own story. I’d love to know what that comment was. In all the press releases and interviews this is as much information as Strout provides each time. Whatever was said, the result was Oh William!

Strout picks up this third story, in her Lucy Barton trilogy, in William and Lucy’s twilight years. William is onto marriage number three and Lucy’s beloved second husband, David has recently died. Their children, Chrissy and Becka have given William an ancestry package for his birthday. What he discovers about his mother’s life before she married his father, deeply upsets and confuses him. He asks Lucy for help.

The help required turns out to be a road trip back to his mother’s home town. During this time together, Lucy and William reminisce about shared family memories, but by the end of the road trip, deeper home truths come out.

_{He was blaming me for something that had nothing to do with our present lives.}

Over the course of the first two books, My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible, we gained insight into Lucy’s loveless, poverty-stricken childhood. Throughout Oh William! the insight gained is into William’s past. His childhood was far more loving and abundant than Lucy’s (or his mother’s), yet he closes down emotionally, blocking any attempts to comfort him or to connect. By the end of Oh William! Lucy is still in the same spot as before, acknowledging we can never really know what is going inside of someone else, let alone ourselves. Personal awareness and growth is hard work, in fiction and in real life.

Thankfully Lucy makes some progress throughout the three books. Her relationship with her daughters has improved vastly as they learn to communicate better. She also drops the idealistic views of her mother that she carried for many years, creating a ‘nice mother‘ in her mind instead that she talks to when she needs comfort. On a visit to Amgash to see her siblings, she finally observes, ‘these lives are not the lives of people who come fully from love from the moment they are born‘.

And it wouldn’t be an Elizabeth Strout book without a cameo appearance by Bob Burgess, or at least his ex-wife Pam.

I’m glad I read the trilogy through for that sense of completion, but there is a slightness to these three stories that almost threatens to underwhelm. Strout spends a lot of time teasing out the truth in a very agreeable manner, but I simply did not respond to Lucy in the way I responded to Olive Kitteridge. Olive’s brusqueness makes her stories far more colourful and the reading experience more intense; she’s someone you love to hate. Lucy, is just oh Lucy!

Title: Oh William!
Author: Elizabeth Strout
ISBN: 9780241508176
Imprint: Viking
Published: 19th October 2021
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 240

This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life recognises the continuous connection to Country, community and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They are the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and skies on which we live and they are this nations first storytellers.