Elizabeth Strout : Oh William

Elizabeth Strout (born January 6, 1956) is an American novelist and author. Elizabeth Strout was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire.  From a young age she was drawn to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days.  She was also drawn to books, and spent hours of her youth in the local library lingering among the stacks of fiction.  During the summer months of her childhood she played outdoors, either with her brother, or, more often, alone, and this is where she developed her deep and abiding love of the physical world: the seaweed covered rocks along the coast of Maine, and the woods of New Hampshire with its hidden wildflowers.

During her adolescent years, Strout continued writing avidly, having conceived of herself as a writer from early on.  She read biographies of writers, and was already studying – on her own – the way American writers, in particular, told their stories.  Her first story was published when she was twenty six. Elizabeth Strou is a Prize-winning author 

Books by her are:

LUCY BY THE SEA

OH WILLIAM

OLIVE, AGAIN

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON

THE BURGESS BOYS

OLIVE KITTERIDGE

ABIDE WITH ME

AMY AND ISABELLE

Oh William!, is a sequel to My Name Is Lucy Barton. Its protagonist, a writer with a difficult past, who has fled an impoverished family life in Maine for the bright lights of New York, is drawn back there by a family secret uncovered by her ex-husband. He has a half-sister he knew nothing about. Oh William! explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they've come from — and what they've left behind. Oh William! is a testament to the way that making a family — in Lucy's case through marriage and motherhood — creates a fresh structure of myth and meaning atop the primal one.

The book begins soon after the death of second husband, David, but is about first husband William who has lately been through some very sad events. Married for almost twenty years, having two daughters, and being friendly for a long time. There are many terrible stories of divorce, but except for the separation itself theirs was not one of them. 

When successful American novelist Lucy Barton loses her beloved second husband David, she begins meeting William, whose third wife has just left him. Reasonable for two newly single adults to talk about their mutual losses, to help them come to terms with their past? When William persuades Lucy to join him on a trip to Maine where his mother Catherine grew up, and where he plans to search for his older half-sister, it is far from clear where the journey will take them.

It is a decorous trip (separate hotel rooms!) and each remembers the affection they had for the other. What brought them together, what drove them apart and today, some marriages later, what they make of each other. Slowly, they learn more about themselves.

Lucy had a wretched, deprived childhood in a tiny house on a farm in Illinois. Marriage to William and her success as a novelist has taken her far away to a prosperous existence in New York from where she travels around the world giving talks. She is deeply involved with her daughters’ lives; did her own mother have the same love for her that she shares so naturally with her daughters?

William’s father was a German POW who was fortunate to get to the US. His mother Constance fell enough in love with the tall handsome stranger to leave behind her young daughter. As William and Lucy make their way around empty villages and farms in rural Maine, they come to the broken-down old hovel where Constance had lived. Seeing the similarity to her own family home, Lucy tells William, ‘You married your mother’. No, he replies to her surprise, he married Lucy because she was so exuberant and full of joy. Eventually, it is Lucy alone who meets William’s half-sister and discovers the strong resentment she feels for him, seeing him as a symbol of why their mother abandoned her.

After their trip to Maine, William asks Lucy to come with him on a short holiday to the sun and sand of the Cayman Islands. Lucy is first surprised, then slowly begins to understand: the William she sees today is really no different from the one she married, but neither of them is the William she had made him out to be. The moral: we paste characters onto people we know and then fail to see them for who they really are.

This is a remarkable book that slowly unwinds memories and misconceptions from the past and uses them to understand the present. The writing is consciously varied: strong and effective when describing the countryside and filled with broken sentences as Lucy tries to put together the thoughts in her mind.