I didn’t get it. If that makes me a philistine or a person who can’t appreciate fine literature, so be it. I still didn’t really get it.

The narrator, Lucy Barton, tells the story of her life and her relationship with her mother in particular, by recounting the conversations that took place between her and her mother during a hospital stay in which the daughter, Lucy, contracts an undiagnosed illness and stays in the hospital for “almost nine weeks”. At the behest of Lucy’s husband, a strange character in his own right, Lucy’s mother comes from Illinois to New York City to stay with her in the hospital. The mother tells some stories, waves intermittently at Lucy, and remains constantly at hand and available for several days. They don’t touch much, maybe at all, and Lucy is not allowed to talk about her ow life, her husband, and her children to her mother whom she hasn’t seen in over ten years. Then, the mother leaves.

And that’s the whole 191 page story. Lucy says several times that she feels like a misfit, different. “I don’t know how others are,” she says. As Lucy listens to her mother’s stories and as she remembers her childhood, it comes out that Lucy’s father was physically, emotionally, and sexually(?) abusive, but Lucy’s mother ignored the abuse or maybe was subject to it, or part of it, or both, herself.

Lucy says that the book isn’t about her marriage, but she tells us a lot about her marriage and about her two daughters and about the dysfunction in her own adult family, probably a result of the dysfunction and abuse in her childhood. It’s a sad saga, but so disjointed that just when I was starting to feel compassion for Lucy and even for her mother, the narrative would veer off in some other direction to talk about Lucy’s writing life or the nurses in the hospital or something else seemingly inconsequential and irrelevant. A picture of how victims of abuse sometimes deflect and avoid when the emotion becomes too strong? Maybe, but I found it annoying and confusing.

I was planning to read Elizabeth Strout’s new book, Anything Is Possible, which is said to take place in the same midwestern Illinois town that Lucy hails from. However, since I didn’t “get” this book, I doubt I would like the companion short stories either.