Anything Is Possible (Amgash #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

Whenever I write, I try and be as honest as I can about life as I know it—or can imagine it—and as honest as I can about the people who are living it on my pages. In Oh William! I was really interested in Lucy Barton looking at the life she had lived with her former husband William. I had side-stepped it in My Name is Lucy Barton, but I suddenly realized, Oh yes, there is a whole story here! In Anything is Possible we get glimpses into the people who knew Lucy when she was young, and all their observations came right back to me as I wrote Oh William!

It seemed the older he grew—and he had grown old—the more he understood that he could not understand this confusing contest between good and evil, and that maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth.

I am very fond of Tommy Guptill, (I love him) and I wanted him to reflect all that is good here on Earth. His kindness to Pete Barton is a symbol of that—Pete Barton who never hurt another person. And so, as I was writing about Tommy I went deeper and deeper into his sense of the world, and I came up with these lines. It seemed to be something Tommy would genuinely feel, and wonder about. As I wrote Oh William! I used the very same technique of always trying and trying to feel what it is like to be another person. Lucy’s brother Pete is a good person, and so is Tommy Guptill. And so somehow these words arrived to me, Tommy’s wonderment at the good and evil contest he sees played out in this world, and that he could not figure it out. So, he thought: Maybe we are not supposed to be able to figure it out. (Sweet man.)

Oh, it was the mother. It was the mother. She must have been the really dangerous one.

My intention here was to get another point of view in this book about the Barton’s mother, and I saw that this could come from Tommy as he watched the fury with which Pete Barton broke down that sign. I do not like to press a reader’s face into serious abusive situations, and so it came to me that through dear Tommy we could perhaps entertain the thought that in fact Lucy and Pete and Vicky’s mother had been the really dangerous one.

We’re all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it’s okay.

This harks back to My Name is Lucy Barton, where Lucy reflects that we all love imperfectly. Because we do. But so what? We love! Why would we not be imperfect in our loving, who is perfect? I would like to know. And Patty understands this. Of all people, Patty understands this and is trying to convey it to her friend.

Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves.

You know, I did not mean this in a bad way, or a cynical way, not at all. I meant it to be in a truthful way. After all, we are ourselves and we have to pay attention to ourselves. This is really all I meant. We live inside ourselves, and so we are concerned about who we are

This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.

And here is the better part of that earlier statement. That when we love someone we are protected a little bit from the world, through this very act of loving someone else.

People could surprise you. Not just their kindness, but also their sudden ability to express things the right way.

My heart breaks for Charlie Macauley and his wife. Charlie—through the Vietnam War—endured things that he has, quite literally, found to be unendurable. And so he is forever isolated from the world. And yet here is his wife saying so straightforwardly, you can go back there—to the Memorial—any time you want to. And he is struck with the simplicity and her ability to say this. Because the poor man cannot do this in his own life, he cannot say the things he wants to say.

She came to understand that people had to decide, really, how they were going to live.

This line reminds me of the first novel I wrote, Amy and Isabelle, when Isabelle realizes: “How we live matters.” And I think that is what I was trying to get at here. Dottie, who has lived through much, understands that people have to decide how they are going to live. I think somebody like Dottie would think this. She is a good person, conscientious with the ability to love.

Shelly Small as a woman who suffered only from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be.

It came to me as I was writing this story that for Dottie, who has been through so much in her life, would understand this about Shelley Small. Isn’t this—do you think so?—a common complaint? People are living lives they thought would be different from what they are. Well, I think, welcome to the world! We all live lives (many of us do) that are different from the lives we thought we would lead. But in this case, Shelly is not able to transcend this, as many of us are not. And that saddens me, the inability to transcend. Because we are here only briefly and we (oh, I would hope) should try and embrace the unembraceable.

To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened.

I think this is a true sentence. To really listen is an active thing. Think about it. How often do we really feel that we are really listened to? And don’t you think when we feel that we have been listened to, that the person listening has taken part in our life in a real way? As opposed to people who only sort of listen? I thought Dottie would know this. It reminds me of one of my favorite characters that I wrote about, Bob Burgess, in The Burgess Boys. whose sister-in-law thinks that he has the gift of dropping into a person’s life feet first for a few moments, because he is such a good listener, and can be inside the world of the speaker, which is what good listening tries to do.

They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.

Need I say more? (But I will.) This is Annie’s ability to transcend and to understand things in a way that her poor siblings cannot. Just because she is Annie. It sort of also describes how when she is on stage she barely hears the applause, she is only interested in getting somewhere else, in that case inside the head of the person she is playing. But this resonates with that—she leaves this world for another.