US author Elizabeth Strout may have won the Pulitzer Prize and currently feature on the Man Booker long-list for My Name is Lucy Barton but the 60-year old writer endured years of rejection before becoming a popular quantity in contemporary literature.
“I sent out stories and I didn’t even get, ‘Try us again,’ I just got the basic ‘No,’” she told The Guardian shortly before My Name is Lucy Barton made the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction long-list earlier this year.(The Bailey's prize was subsequently own by Irish author Lisa McInerney for her debut, The Glorious Heresies.)
Her first novel Amy and Isabelle was published in 1998. “I could just handle a sentence better because I’d been writing for so long, I could get the sentence to go into that crevice, ” she revealed. “I thought, ‘Probably no one will ever read this – oh well, just write it.’”
Strout's significant breakthrough came with the publication of her 2008 short stories, Olive Kitteridge which were later adpated for an Emmy award-winning HBO TV series, starring Frances McDormand. The stories won Strout the much-coveted Pulitzer prize.
The Baileys Women's Prize website featured an interview with Strout in the course of which she was asked why she was a writer. "I never remember wanting to be anything but a writer, " she revealed. "In fact, I feel I was born a writer, and I always knew that. I do remember a phase when I was quite young, thinking perhaps I could be an astronaut (I suspect the point of view was interesting to me, to think of seeing the earth all on its own, so far away.)
Strout had also wanted to be a concert pianist for a short period, " but I had such stage fright I knew that would never happen. So writing was always with me, starting from my earliest memory of myself; I was a writer."
A disturbing and troubled family history is revealed in My Name is Lucy Barton while a complicated mother-daughter relationship grinds uneasily through the compelling narrative, told by the daughter of the piece, who is herself a writer.
The other books on this year's Man Booker long list, some of which are as yet unpublished, are as follows :
Paul Beatty (US) - The Sellout (Oneworld); J.M. Coetzee (South African-Australian) - The Schooldays of Jesus (Harvill Secker); A.L. Kennedy (UK) - Serious Sweet (Jonathan Cape); Deborah Levy (UK) - Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton); Graeme Macrae Burnet (UK) - His Bloody Project (Contraband); Ian McGuire (UK) - The North Water (Scribner UK); David Means (US) - Hystopia (Faber & Faber); Wyl Menmuir (UK) -The Many (Salt); Ottessa Moshfegh (US) - Eileen (Jonathan Cape); Virginia Reeves (US) - Work Like Any Other (Scribner UK); David Szalay (Canada-UK) - All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape); Madeleine Thien (Canada) - Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta Books).
The Man Booker shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday September 13 and the winner on Tuesday October 25.
David Szalay's novel, All That Man Is will be reviewed on these pages shortly. Meanwhile, Read Avril Hoare's review of My Name is Lucy Barton here
