In Spring 2021 I wrote a post about Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge (published in 2009) and the protagonist’s hunger that acts as a metaphor for unresolved desires and issues.
A similar idea appears in Strout’s latest novel, Oh William! The novel, published in 2021, acts as a sequel to Strout’s earlier novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, published in 2016. My Name is Lucy Barton is about the titular Lucy Barton, a writer based in New York, and her complicated relationship with her mother. At the centre of the novel is Lucy’s account of an episode that took place a few years earlier when, hospitalised after complications following an appendectomy, she was visited by her estranged mother. That experience, and the conversations between mother and daughter, trigger memories in Lucy of her impoverished and abusive childhood in the mid-West, and cause her to question the choices she has made which have allowed her to escape – at least geographically – her past: her decision to become a writer, her marriage to William and their two daughters. The fact that the reader learns that, at the time of narrating the novel, Lucy and William are now divorced, raises a question mark over at least one of the choices she has made.
Oh William! picks up Lucy’s story a few years later. Lucy’s second husband, David, a cellist, and a man she describes as being a ‘tremendous comfort’ to her has recently died. Her and William’s two daughters are now grown up and navigating their own paths through adulthood, and William is now on his third marriage, to Estelle, with whom he has a young daughter, Bridget (his second marriage, to Joanne, a woman with whom he’d had a long affair during his marriage to Lucy, was shortlived). Early in the novel Estelle leaves William, so William and Lucy are thrown back together again, not romantically, but as two lonely older adults in need of companionship.
Shortly before she leaves him, Estelle buys William a subscription for an ancestry website, and his research into his family history uncovers a secret about his mother, Catherine (that I won’t reveal but will leave you to find out for yourself by reading the novel). This spurs William to take a trip to Maine (where his mother came from) and Lucy agrees to go with him. As well as finding out about this long-hidden secret and discovering things about Catherine that they never knew, the trip gives Lucy and William a chance to talk, to connect and to accept how unknowable they – and everyone – ultimately is to one another. As Lucy says in the final lines of the book:
‘..we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!
Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.
But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.
This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.’
This essential unknowability of everyone – which Lucy comes to accept at the end of the novel – may lie at the root of her hunger which is commented on by William when they are on their trip to Maine: ‘you get hungry – which you always are, Lucy, you are always hungry … so everything becomes about getting Lucy something to eat.’ For William, Lucy’s hunger reflects her self-absorption, though I think it may rather be her way of addressing the emptiness she feels inside of herself when she grapples with the questions of who she is and why she has made the choices she has. When Lucy reflects on William’s outburst in her hotel room she feels an intense pain in her chest, in response to which ‘[she] turned on the overhead light and ordered a cheeseburger to be brought to the room’ When Lucy and William get to the airport for their flight back to New York, Lucy is feeling anxious about something that she did on the trip and how it might have affected William (who claims to be fine about it). Lucy is struck by the strangeness of this small provincial airport, on its ‘emptiness’ and on the fact that ‘There was no place in it to get anything to eat’, a point that she repeats a few sentences later when William goes off for a walk and she, feeling hungry, goes in search of food.
Catherine’s secret past is a central thread of the novel, and her unknowability to others (and, if Lucy, is right, also to herself) may also illuminate one episode in which she appears which also involves food. Catherine is terminally ill with cancer, and Lucy, unlike Catherine’s friends, is ‘not afraid of death’ and happy to spend periods of time with her mother-in-law. Lucy notes that they talk a lot, and thinks, in retrospect, that she did not ‘really believe[d] [Catherine] would die’ and ‘She may not have really believed it either’. Certainly when Catherine is in great pain and Lucy reassures her that ‘it will be soon now’ Catherine’s reaction is one of horrified denial and rejection: ‘Get out of here you – you horrible girl! You piece of trash!’ However, before this point, when Catherine is still having treatment, Lucy knows that there is a one hour gap after the treatment before Catherine will get ill, which is an opportunity for food. So she takes Catherine to a diner where they have coffee and muffins, and Lucy remembers Catherine ‘kind of stuffing the muffin into her mouth almost furtively’. The description is unusual, with the contrast between ‘stuffing’ and ‘furtively’ suggesting the hunger that Lucy displays (and William complains about) coupled with a guilt for feeling and behaving that way. Catherine is literally dying, and that is transferred to the muffin (so she is metaphorically dying from hunger), but at the same time is refusing to know or acknowledge that truth.
The muffin is a quintessential American bake – very different from the English muffins I made from Jane Austen’s Emma , and probably the most traditional flavour is the blueberry muffin. I had an excess of lemons so combined the two flavours with pleasing results!
A HUNGRY WOMAN’S LEMON AND BLUEBERRY MUFFINS
Ingredients (makes 12)
280g self-raising flour (or 270g plain flour and 10g baking powder)
1/2 teaspooon of bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
160g caster sugar
90g unsalted butter melted and cooled
1 large egg
Zest and juice of 1 large lemon
300ml milk
180g blueberries
2 tablespoons lemon juice
4-5 tablespoons Icing sugar
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180C/ 160C fan/ Gas mark 4.
Place the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and caster sugar in a large bowl. Mix with a large metal spoon to combine and make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients.
Place the butter, egg, lemon zest and juice and milk in a jug and whisk gently to combine. Pour into the well in the dry ingredients, add the blueberries, and mix with the metal spoon until the ingredients are just combined (don’t overmix the batter as that will result in a heavy bake).
Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper cases. Divide the batter between the cases and place into the preheated oven for 25-35 minutes until well-risen and golden brown. A skewer or cake tester inserted into the middle of a muffin should come out clean.
Remove the muffins from the tin and place on a wire rack to cool.
When cold, you can ice the muffins. Mix the lemon juice and icing sugar to make a thin paste and then drizzle over the muffins.
