Elizabeth Strout Talking Books

The time is just after 00:30am. Next, Talking Books.

Welcome to Hay Festival. Now celebrating its 30th year. It brings

together scientists, historians, novelists, musicians, all of them

here to discuss their latest ideas and stories. Today I'm interviewing

the multi-award winning author Elizabeth Strout. Her sixth novel,

all of them receiving critical acclaim, but it was Olive Kitteridge

that received the Pulitzer prize. Born and raised in small towns in

New Hampshire and main, her latest book Anything is Possible explores

the cost of extraordinary characters and their own small-time lives. --

explores a cast. I stand to be corrected, but I think

it was Chekhov who was asked by I think his brother, it was a hint

about writing, and he apparently said, you know, the thing about

writing is find the small detail that reveals the big story. I think

Elizabeth Strout, if I may say so, follows in that tradition because

what she does is tell the story of small individual lives and yet they

seem to reveal a massive truth about the human condition, about the

American human condition. And certainly her latest book Anything

is Possible follows in that tradition. I read somewhere that you

said it's not good or bad that interests me as a writer, but the

murkiness of human experience and the consistent imperfection of our

lives. We might want to talk about that in a little while. Anyway, here

is Elizabeth Strout, her book is Anything is Possible. Thank you.

Reading your books, one thing struck me, the extent to which geography

shapes your characters, shapes the people, shapes the people you write

about. Just describe some geography for us and how that shapes people. I

think place is very important and literature because we all live in a

place, so wherever our place happens to be, whether it's a city or rule

or Maine,, which is both rural and non- city, or the midwest, we all

live in a place and the place is part of who we are. And the time in

history that we live in is also who we are. What I have written mostly

about Akrotiri because I came from Maine many, many years ago and I

came from many generations of Maine. But anything is possible. I put them

in the midwest, its own kind of geography. There's nothing about sky

in the midwest, it is just the sky, sky, sky. And when I wrote My Name

Is Lucy Barton, as soon as I understood that her mother had never

been on a plane before, something about that made me realise, OK, I

see Lucy as having grown up in a tiny house surrounded by sky. And so

that's her place of origin and then she moved and left and ended up

living in New York City and crossed all these class lines. People talk

about the flyover States, you fly over and forget about it. In a sense

you are talking about forgotten people? Exactly. Do you mind reading

a little extract? The bookies just started with place and geography. I

think you've got a passage that does it for us. This is just from the

very first part, where the man who used to be the Janata in Lucy

Barton's school is driving around. This morning Tommy drove slowly to

the town of Carlisle for errands. It was a sunny day in May and his

wife's birthday was a few days away. All around him were open fields. The

corn newly planted and the soyabeans too. The number of fields were still

brown as they had been ploughed, but mostly there was the high blue sky

with a few white clouds scattered near the horizon. The family had

been outcasts, even in a town like this. The extreme poverty and

strangeness making them so. The oldest man, a man named Pete, lived

alone in their house now. The middle child was two towns away and the

youngest, Lucy Barton, had fled many years ago. Thank you. So, we think

here in England, in Britain, but we know America, and yet reading your

books you understand that there's lots of America you don't know. When

we look at America we see it through the big events, the elections and so

on, maybe. Just to get an idea of these people who populate your book,

let's say last year's election, which we all followed, would your

people be Trump people or Clinton people? Well, the people are right

about. Yes. APPLAUSE. Make that very clear. The people I write about in

this particular book Anything is Possible, if they bothered to vote,

some of them would have probably voted for Trump. But what is it

about them, what would drive them towards that? Is it relationship to

authority, relationship to power? I've always been interested in class

in America and we don't talk about class in America that much, but it

certainly is there. As far as I'm concerned, all my work has been

about class but in My Name Is Lucy Barton I pushed it. She crossed

class lines, which is a very American story and she ended up

arguably a middle-class woman and I kept thinking, what does that feel

like for her? But going back to her home of origin, these people are

working class or even lower than that in some ways. Lower working

class. And if you think about class not necessarily in terms of

education, which is obviously a part of it, and not -- in terms of the

power people feel about the destiny of their lives, then these are

people who feel powerless. What is it about you that made you want to

give voice to these people, these flyover people, people you don't

normally hear from? I'm just so interesting ordinary people, the

most ordinary lives you can find. So as I've written my way through my

career, I find myself drawn more and more to the lives that don't have a

voice. These are people who... They are just living their lives and they

don't have a voice and I wonder about their internal lives, because

all of us have our interior lives and they come up against, you know,

the external world and it is always so interesting to me how we walk

around with all of our different multitude of thoughts and feelings

and that interact with the world. So these people who have just the most

ordinary lives, I'm just so curious, what is it they're feeling or

thinking? And living through. So when Lucy Barton comes back and goes

back home after 17 years, she's doing much more. What is she doing?

She's definitely crossing geography. Right. You say she is crossing

class? Right. And she is also crossing well. She plays a welfare

role in her family. She does. She has become a successful New York may

be woman, so to speak, and she does go back after 17 years of not being

home and visit her siblings in her childhood home. Her brother has

lived there all of his life alone and he cleans the house for her,

which is... Buys a new rug. Yeah, he buys a new rug, he wanted to nice

for her. And then her sister pays a visit and she is quite

confrontational and angry about what the story, why did you bother to

come home? Sorry. I find that interesting. The three of them are

together, 17 years they've been apart. But no one is celebrating

what Lucy has achieved. No, no. Because in this sort of environment,

and I know this from having come from Maine, which is a similar sort

of background, because the white Protestant people from Maine that

have lived there forever, as my family does, some of them moved to

the mid-west a couple of 100 years ago and there's a similar kind of

person. The point is that if you pull attention to yourself that is

really disgusting. You're just not supposed to do that, so nobody is

going to praise Lucy. So it wasn't envy and jealousy, it was just

that... Well, she thinks she is better... Well, they think she

thinks she is better. She fled and she became somebody different and

that's just not what you're supposed to do. Who does she think she is?

She doesn't eat up. At referee isn't flaunting her wealth or her success.

No, she is trying to be pleasant. You said you were interested in

ordinary lives and ordinary people. But the book is anything but

ordinary. There is child abuse, post-traumatic stress syndrome,

obesity, a character who calls herself I think Fatty patty, marital

infidelity, voyeurism. This isn't life... In our sheltered way, this

isn't life as we know it. Really? You might just ask some people in

the audience. I wouldn't dare! You go ahead and ask. No, I'm just

saying. Just saying that it might be a little more ordinary than we

think. More common? Yes, yes, yes. It's quite depressing. You know, I

wonder if in writing this, I mean, how did it affect you? Because it's

a very ... Very troubled lives. I didn't find it depressing myself. I

loved these people, I always loved everybody... One of the fun things

for me in writing is that when I go to the page I don't judge my

characters and it's just so freeing, because in real life we are

judgemental and it just gets... We are judgemental. Yeah, people are,

and it's so tiresome. So when I go to the page I just transcend it and

I just think, here are these people, I love them, let me watch what

they're doing and record it. I don't find their lives depressing, I find

their lives real to me and so I record them. There is one character,

Charlie, who says beneath it all people were bright, scurrying off to

find garbage to it. -- people were rats. Again and very harsh

judgement. They may be small lives, but in their own way. And I know you

think this. In their own way they are trying to make the best best of

it. Right. Charlie, who thinks that, has been in Vietnam and he has been

completely decimated because of his experiences in the more a number of

years ago. -- in the war. I am very interested in the idea that certain

men can go to war and manage it and certain men go to war and can't

manage it and Lucy's father wouldn't do it and that's what ruined his

life. With Charlie, I wanted it reverberate, the sense that this mad

in a later war, he just couldn't do those things that we had to do, and

so his life has been damaged irrevocably. I read somewhere that

you knew you were going to be a writer, or wanted to be a writer at

16, and get your first book didn't come out... Till I was 43. 43. I was

going to say in your 40s. Obviously 16 is very young. I actually wanted

to be a writer since I was about four, actually. So about 40 years.

Of apprenticeship. I was writing at a very young age. The mother gave me

notebooks and said, write down what you did today, so I would. I thought

in terms of sentences and I knew I was a writer from a very, very young

age and then I just... I didn't, I just couldn't get it right. I

couldn't find the muscular enough sentence to convey what I needed to

convey. I couldn't do it until... People say in your prose nothing is

wasted. Every word counts. That was a crafty with trying to master? I

kept doing it and doing it. You mentioned the book My Name Is Lucy

Barton, essentially about the relationship between a mother and

daughter. In it there's a point in which the daughter is in hospital,

hasn't seen her mum years and years, suddenly she wakes up in hospital

and Marmie, as she calls her, is there and in the space I think five

days they start talking and trying to understand and learn more about

each other. Again, there is this pathos in this at least quite early

on. She wakes up and says, Marmie, why did you come here? The answer,

there is none. At least not straightaway.

Right. Well, that is her mother. What can you do? There are some

others that are not as committed to give as others. -- communicative.

Her mother has and story, as well. But my particular feeling is that

these are two people that love each other very much. -- mother has her

own story. It is such a problematic relationship. There are many

problems within their relationship. When I wrote My Name Is Lucy Barton,

I made it porous in a way because I want readers to bring their own life

experiences to my books, and they will. I mean, you will bring alike

express to any book you read. But the more that is written, the more

difficult it is for a reader to enter into the text itself. The

hospital is in New York. So we are now in the city. At one point in the

book, I think Agro one things of this, and she says she discovers the

way some people in the city have a depth of disgust city people feel

for the truly provincial. It fell to me like you were very much the kind

of country girl, do you really feel that about the city? I do think

that, yes the and I have lived in the city for 35 years. I have lived

in New York City for 35 years. I love the city but I think that there

are people in New York City who do feel a sense of propulsion for the

truly provincial. But what you mean by the truly provincial? Because

they are ill educated? What they find difficult? Clothes have a lot

to do that. Clothes? Yes. I'm serious. The people, have a dressed

in New York is very different to Maine, which... Dress is a very

distinctive way of letting people know you are not really from the

city, or, as a friend of mine said recently, I said, you know, my

daughter, who has been born and raised in York city, my daughter

told me you cannot wear pink any more. And my friend, who was also

raised in New York City. -- born and raised in New York City. We are told

that in America, there is not class. Well, there is. Why do Americans

insist, then? Are they try to persuade themselves? They are try to

convince themselves that there is no class. At this moment in history,

class will be talked about more, because of the vertical situation.

It has to be talked about more and people are beginning to recognise it

as a real thing. But I think the whole American dream idea that we

will accept anybody - and we will, or did... Do you think anything is

fundamentally changed? We will see. When you talk about... Go on, say

it. I can't. I am going to say. When you talk about this deep disgust

that city people have, is that also why so many people in, how should I

court, metropolitan America, the shock and horror that went around

when that Donald Trump got elected? Right. Because they lived in a

bubble. They didn't know people who would vote for Donald Trump. And so

they thought, and this is so interesting because a number of

years ago, I did realise that New Yorkers were provincial in their own

way. Right. And they are. Because they think that the way that they

think is the only way to think. And isn't that what we would think of as

provincial? What happens to you, the 35 years of New York you have under

your skin, what happens you when you go back to Maine? LAUGHTER. Well.

People said hello. And I say hello! And they say how are you doing? That

is just their nature. It is entirely a different culture. It is very

interesting to me. I think because they have lived their long as any

American has lived in America, and the culture is so distinctly

isolated, and there is a sense of isolation. This community, but it is

really about the individual. It just is. There is a sense of taciturnity

and individual star. It reminds me of John Cheever from Massachusetts,

and his mother wrote to him and said, Johnny, how come you have not

told me have been winning all these prizes? And he said because he

thought she would be ashamed of him. I read that and I got that. I

understand that. I don't know if this is right, but you up probably

best known for Olive Kitteridge. It is about a cantankerous old woman,

for those who have not read it. It seemed to me like a lot of the book

you spent hating her, God she is awful. If I was the husband, I would

have run away. And then suddenly, I liked her. And I thought, when did

Elizabeth Strout do that? Yes? How did that happen? You always liked

her I presume. I knew she was badly behaved. I was aware of that.

Describe what she does to her daughter-in-law's -- daughter-in-law

is on the day of her wedding day. -- -- Maine. She still so bra and marks

her sweater. That was a fun day at work. I had to tell you. --

daughter-in-law on. I had no idea that was to happen. She doesn't

because the daughter-in-law has her dress. And Olive Kitteridge was so

excited by the dress, animated by hand, it was floral and pretty lips

as she overhears the daughter-in-law Ins Offene -- insulting the dress.

But one I went on the road with Olive Kitteridge, so many women

leaned into me and said, how did you know? So I am just saying a lot of

women want to do this. Ladies and gentlemen, Elizabeth Strout. Thank

you so much.