Lara answers “Is the reader supposed to know what in...”

A Goodreads user asked this question about My Name Is Lucy Barton (Amgash, #1):

Is the reader supposed to know what in particular has kept lucy away? She makes allusions but I'm not quite sure what conclusion reader should draw

Lara

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[There's no way to know for sure, unless it is revealed in Anything is Possible, as someone noted. I haven't read that one yet. I found the lack of a full explanation of Lucy's childhood stressful, and it's part of why I didn't rate the book as highly as I did Strout's others. Then again, if her goal was to make us feel uneasy and unsettled, she definitely succeeded. Ambiguous, possibly sexual, abuse is scary, because it's hard not to imagine the worst when we're not given all the details.

Clearly Lucy experienced horrible neglect, since she was locked in a truck more than once when she was younger than 5. We also know that her family of 5 lived in a garage without hot water, which would make for a pretty austere childhood even in the healthiest of families. But then there are the clear hints pointing to some kind of sexual abuse. Snakes are commonly used as sexual metaphors, and Lucy is terrified of them. Her father's hand on the back of her head is deliberately described with ambiguous language, so I found it hard not to have my mind go to the worst case scenario. And then of course there's the story of the father in Maine who had a nervous breakdown, after which Lucy immediately tells us that she had to write down what happened to her so she could share it with her therapist.

Because Lucy Barton is a writer, I'm tempted to say this book might be about Strout's struggles with her own autobiographical material. It doesn't really matter to me what is "true" in the story (and it isn't really my business anyway), but it is interesting to note that the father who had the nervous breakdown lived in Maine, where Strout grew up. That story of the father compulsively masturbating, which Lucy only happens to overhear, is the only specific information about sexual abuse that we get. In a book full of innuendo and metaphor, it's quite startling. It's almost like Lucy is using that story as a kind of screen memory, as the only way she can actually talk about her own childhood of abuse. (hide spoiler)]

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My Name Is Lucy Barton

by Elizabeth Strout (Goodreads Author)

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