It is like sliding down the outside of a really long glass building while nobody sees you."īook Reviews In 'Olive, Again,' Elizabeth Strout Revisits An Old Friend
Grief is such a - oh, such a solitary thing this is the terror of it, I think. She tells us that in her grief for David "I have felt grief for William as well. Seven years her senior, he is also experiencing unhappy changes in his life (which I'll leave for the reader to discover), and calls on Lucy to help navigate them. But against all odds they have remained friendly. She'd left William, a parasitologist who has never let the women in his life get too close, after nearly 20 years of marriage.
She finds some welcome distraction in revisiting her relationship with her first husband, William Gerhardt, the philandering father of her two grown daughters. In Oh William! Lucy, now 64, is mourning the death of her beloved second husband, a cellist named David Abramson.
Elizabeth Strout's latest, her eighth book, had me at the first line: "I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William." The forthright, plainspoken speaker is Lucy Barton, who we came to love in My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and Anything is Possible (2017), where we learned how she overcame a traumatic, impoverished childhood in Amgash, Illinois, to become a successful writer living in New York City.
0 kommentar(er)
