Growing up, Strout told me, she had a sense of “just swimming in all this ridiculous extra emotion.” She was a “chatterbox,” people said. “Liz has always been a talker,” her brother, Jon, told me. “I’m much more reserved, much more of a Maine Yankee. My sister’s not much of a Yankee.”
Her passion and volubility were frowned upon in the taciturn world she inhabited. “I can remember my father saying to me at Thanksgiving, when my aunts would be around, ‘When I put my hand on my tie, it means you’re talking too much,’” Strout said. “I often felt that I had been born in the wrong place.”
Eleven generations ago, a sixteen-year-old named John MacBean came from Scotland to New England. “He made leather shoes,” Strout’s mother, Beverly, said one morning. “And the funny thing is that L. L. Bean—who is also descended from that line—made leather shoes. He was cousin to my grandfather.” We were sitting in a diner at the Topsham Fair Mall, not far from where Jon used to have a dental practice. (He had stopped by the diner earlier for a blueberry muffin. His mother ordered one, too, though she worried that it would be too large.) Mrs. Strout, who will turn ninety in July, was carrying a bag of cloth she’d bought next door, at Jo-Ann Fabrics, and was wearing a gray-blue wool cloak that she’d made: she still sews all her own clothes, and used to make clothes for Elizabeth, whom she called Wizzle. “Anyway,” she said. “That’s the Beans.”
Her late husband, Dick—who was “kindness itself,” she said—was from a similarly old New England family; one of his forebears, a cousin of his great-great-grandfather’s, was appointed the lighthouse keeper of the Portland Head Light during the Ulysses S. Grant Administration. (The job stayed in the family for six decades.) Dick was a professor of parasitology at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, and Beverly taught expository writing at the local high school, which her children attended; the family shuttled between Durham and Harpswell.
In an interview on NPR, Strout told the host, Terry Gross, “I understood that my father in many ways was the more decent person, but my mother was much more interesting.” Her mother taught her to observe others, and to write what she saw in a notebook. “She kind of whetted my appetite for characters,” Strout told me. “We would be sitting in a parking lot, waiting for my father to come out of a store, and she’d point to a woman and say, ‘Well, she’s not looking forward to getting home.’ Or, ‘Second wife.’” It was Strout’s first experience of contemplating the interlocking lives that make up a small town, the way their disappointments and small joys—“little bursts,” Olive calls them—can merge into a single story.
In the diner, a man wearing a maroon work shirt approached the table. “Well, hello, it’s been a long time!” Mrs. Strout said to him.
He explained their history: “I did a lot of work for these people—septic system, road.”
“I need some more septic system,” she told him. “They broke through the pipe. Are you doing it still?”
“I might take a look at it, yah. Jon still gets me out of some jams with my teeth. He said you were going to be celebrating a big birthday this summer. Mine’s this Saturday. I’m going to be seventy.”
“Well,” Mrs. Strout said. “I guess you’re growing up.”
The connections and constraints of small-town life—and the almost erotic ache for something more—remain Strout’s primary subject. Her new collection, “Anything Is Possible,” takes place mostly in Lucy Barton’s childhood home, a depressed farming town in Illinois that is strikingly similar to the towns that Strout has written about in Maine. (Many Mainers who survived the Civil War moved to the Midwest, where there were open spaces to farm and timber to log.) The inhabitants are white, reserved, generally decent, and suspicious of new arrivals. “It’s a similar kind of person who has gone from the East to the Midwest,” Strout said. “They’re Congregationalists”—like her family—“and they’re plain, plain, plain.”
In the communities that Strout creates, the mores are set by tradition, and people aren’t confused about their roles. But this continuity provides no protection. In “Olive Kitteridge,” a young man, returning home to Maine to commit suicide in the same place that his mother did, worries about who will find his corpse: “Kevin could not abide the thought of any child discovering what he had discovered; that his mother’s need to devour her life had been so huge and urgent as to spray remnants of corporeality across the kitchen cupboards.” (As he contemplates this, Olive barges in and interrogates him. “‘Jesus,’ Kevin said quietly. ‘Does everybody know everything?’ ‘Oh, sure,’ she said comfortably. ‘What else is there to do?’”) Lucy Barton’s parents hit her “impulsively and vigorously” throughout her childhood, and lock her in the cold cab of a truck as a punishment. Her father is tormented by his experiences in the Second World War, and, in an indelible embarrassment, is caught by a farmer “pulling on himself, behind the barns.” In “Anything Is Possible,” the barns have burned down, and the farmer has become a janitor, haunted by the “terrible screaming sounds of the cows as they died.” The tone of Strout’s fiction is both cozy and eerie, as comforting and unsettling as a fairy tale.
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Strout feels misunderstood when people ask her if characters are based on her mother, her father, herself. “It’s not even remotely how it is,” she said. “Because these are all different people that have visited me. I use myself—I’m the only thing I can use—but I’m not an autobiographical writer.” (When her first book came out, Strout asked her editor if she could do without an author photograph on the jacket. He said no.) “Some people have an idea,” she continued. “I just see a person, and I start describing who this person is.”
Strout recalls having almost mystical experiences of temporarily inhabiting other people. The first time it happened, she was twelve years old, working at Bailey’s. “This woman came in—she seemed old to me, but she was probably like fifty-five—and she started to talk to me about how her husband had had a stroke, and it had left him depressed,” she recalled. “And I remember so clearly almost feeling her molecules move into me—or my molecules move into her. I understood there was some sort of merging.” This is also how Strout feels when characters “show up, just like that.” They seem like real visitors, bringing dispatches from their lives. “I have a very specific memory. I was loading the dishwasher, and Olive just arrived,” Strout told me. “She was standing by the picnic table at her son’s wedding, and I could peer into her head.” She heard Olive thinking, It’s high time everyone went home. “So I wrote that down immediately. And that was it—there was Olive.”
Once, when Strout was young, she asked her father, “Are we poor?” because they lived so austerely. “He said, ‘Yes!’” Strout told me. “And he said it with great pride.” In her telling, this was a Yankee fiction, an attempt to embody the understated flintiness that they valued. (Jon remembers it differently. “We were poor,” he told me. When I asked in what sense, he said, “Financially.”) It was almost incomprehensible to her family when Strout married into a wealthy, demonstrative Jewish family and moved to New York. “My former husband and his father would kiss when they met,” Strout told me. “I just thought that was so lovely.” Her mother-in-law liked to hear her pronounce Yiddish words in her clipped New England accent. “I could never say anything right except oy vey,” Strout said. “I was made for oy vey.”
Strout and her family lived in a brownstone in Park Slope, which, she said, “felt almost like a village,” except that it was full of people she didn’t know. She joined a writing group, and took classes from the editor Gordon Lish. “She really found what she was looking for in New York,” Zarina said. “I remember clearly stacks of manuscripts throughout my childhood on the dining-room table. They weren’t sacred—we’d kind of eat on them and live around them.”
Strout’s parents didn’t often visit. “They were well educated, but in some ways very provincial,” Feinman said. “New York was alien—it was like Sodom and Gomorrah to them.” (Olive Kitteridge laments having “a little relative” living in the “foreign land of New York City.” She tells a friend, “I guess it’s the way of the world. Hurts, though. Have that DNA flung all over like so much dandelion fuzz.”) Strout feels that her parents disapproved of the way she raised her daughter. “My generation was the one that turned around and became friends with our kids,” she said. “I think they thought that I paid her far too much attention. I mean, I don’t know that, but I think that.”
After Zarina left for college, Strout, who was then working on her second novel, “Abide with Me,” moved out of the brownstone. Feinman told me, “I know that one piece was a desire to really just focus on her writing. A desire to not have to be responsible for anybody else.” It was almost a decade, though, before she and Feinman got divorced. “They like each other so much—that made it confusing,” Zarina, who is thirty-four, said. “My takeaway is that love itself is not enough.”
Unlike Strout’s other books, “My Name Is Lucy Barton” is in the first person. It is about a writer who flees a place where she feels stifled and ends up in New York, delighted by the buzzing humanity around her. She dearly loves her mother, a tough woman who sews and who calls her Wizzle. She is a passionate mother herself, who leaves her first husband.
Barton is told by a friend that to be a writer she would have to be ruthless. Decades later, when she is successful enough to sit with wealthy people “in the waiting room for the doctor who will make them look not old or worried or like their mother,” she reflects on her friend’s advice. “The ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.”
Eight years ago, Strout was onstage at Symphony Space, in New York City, when a man in the audience stood to ask a question. “I’m from Maine, too,” he said. She was skeptical: she had become accustomed to people in Manhattan telling her they were from Maine, when in fact they’d gone to camp there one summer. She asked where he was from. “He said, ‘Lisbon Falls,’” Strout recalled. “I thought, Oh, my God, he really is from Maine. I mean, everything’s shut down, the paper factories are gone.” Lisbon Falls is not a place where people go on family vacations.
When Strout signed books afterward, the man was first in line, and he introduced himself as Jim Tierney. “We chatted for a while, and then, when he left, I remember turning and looking at him and thinking, That should have been my life,” Strout said. “I had no idea that I would ever see him again.” But she realized later that he had slipped her his e-mail address. “We wrote back and forth a few times,” she said. “And then we met twice. And then he moved in.” On their second date, Strout told him that she had been rejected from his alma mater. “He thought about it for a second, and then he said, ‘I’ve never had dinner with someone so stupid they couldn’t get into the University of Maine law school before.’ And I thought, Oh, my God—I love this man.”
Tierney, who became Strout’s second husband, was Maine’s attorney general for ten years, and, before that, a member of the legislature. “My mom married Maine incarnate,” Zarina said, “except that he talks even more than she does.” Once, when they were visiting her in Brooklyn, Tierney noticed a car parked in front of her apartment with Maine plates; he left his business card on the windshield. “They share an intense relationship with Maine,” Zarina added. “It’s a need and an adoration and a loathing.”
