Oh William!

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

William has lately been through some very sad events many of us have but I would like to mention them, it feels almost a compulsion; he is seventy-one years old now.

My second husband, David, died last year, and in my grief for him I have felt grief for William as well. Grief is such a oh, it is such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think. It is like sliding down the outside of a really long glass building while nobody sees you.

But it is William I want to speak of here.

His name is William Gerhardt, and when we married I took his last name, even though at the time it was not fashionable to do so. My college roommate said, Lucy, you re taking his name? I thought you were a feminist. And I told her that I did not care about being a feminist; I told her I did not want to be me anymore. At that time I felt that I was tired of being me, I had spent my whole life not wanting to be me this is what I thought then and so I took his name and became Lucy Gerhardt for eleven years, but it did not ever feel right to me, and almost immediately after William s mother died I went to the motor vehicle place to get my own name back on my driver s license, even though it was more difficult than I had thought it would be; I had to go back and bring in some court documents; but I did.

I became Lucy Barton again.

We were married for almost twenty years before I left him and we have two daughters, and we have been friendly for a long time now how, I am not sure exactly. There are many terrible stories of divorce, but except for the separation itself ours is not one of them. Sometimes I thought I would die from the pain of our separating, and the pain it caused my girls, but I did not die, and I am here, and so is William.

Because I am a novelist, I have to write this almost like a novel, but it is true as true as I can make it. And I want to say oh, it is difficult to know what to say! But

Elizabeth Strout

One proof of Strout s greatness is the sleight of hand with which she injects sneaky subterranean power into seemingly transparent prose. Strout works in the realm of everyday speech, conjuring repetitions, gaps and awkwardness with plain language and forthright diction, yet at the same time unleashing a tidal urgency that seems to come out of nowhere even as it operates in plain sight. The New York Times Book Review

So much intimate, fragile, desperate humanness infuses these pages, it s breathtaking. Almost every declaration carries the force of revelation. The Washington Post

For all the depths of anger and despair they uncover, and the bitterness they attest to, Strout s works insist on the su- perabundance of life, the unrealized bliss always immanent in it. The New York Review of Books

Being privy to the innermost thoughts of Lucy Barton and, more to the point, deep inside a book by Strout makes readers feel safe. We know we re in good hands. NPR

Strout s simple declarative sentences contain continents. Who is better at conveying loneliness, the inability to communicate, to say the deep important things? Who better to illustrate the legacies of imperfect upbringings, of inadequate parents? When William explains that what attracted him to Lucy was her sense of joy, the reader can only agree. This brilliant, compelling, tender novel is quite simply a joy. The Boston Globe

Strout doesn t dress language up in a tuxedo when a wool sweater will suffice. Other novelists must berate themselves when they see what Strout pulls off without any tacky pyrotechnics. Los Angeles Times

The miraculous quality of Strout s fiction is the way she opens up depths with the simplest of touches, and this novel ends with the assurance that the source of love lies less in understanding than in recognition although it may take a lifetime to learn the difference. The Guardian

At the core of . . . Strout s