Oh William!

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (2021) 240 pages

I've enjoyed reading books with the character Lucy Barton, in spite of reading them out of order. In this novel, Lucy is in her late sixties and widowed. We learn much about her life, but not so much that I don't thirst for more. She speaks in a conversational style, offering slivers about many parts of her life: her early years, living in poverty with non-nurturing parents; her college scholarship, which was her passport out of poverty; her first and second marriages; her daughters.

William, the man of the book's title, was her first husband, a driven man, a parasitologist who had taught microbiology for many years. She and he had remained on cordial terms since their divorce, occasionally even using old pet names for each other. Sometime after Lucy's beloved second husband died, William asked Lucy to go a trip with him to Maine to learn more about his mother, and in particular, about a half sister he learned that he had. William first seemed to disbelieve that he'd really had a sister, a girl that his mother purportedly had abandoned when she left her first husband, but now he wants to know all about the woman, even though he's not sure he wants to meet her. Lucy goes along to support him.

Strout's characters are strong, yet vulnerable. And very believable. I first read Anything Is Possible and now Oh William. Next up: the first, My Name Is Lucy Barton.