Few writers bring as much care and close attention to the inner lives of ordinary people as Elizabeth Strout. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1956, Strout grew up in small New England towns, an upbringing that would inform the landscapes and communities of her fiction. She studied English at Bates College and law at Syracuse University before turning fully to writing, and published her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, in 1998.
A decade later, Strout achieved wide recognition with Olive Kitteridge, her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of interconnected stories about a difficult, perceptive woman and the people around her in a small Maine town. Her subsequent books, including The Burgess Boys, My Name Is Lucy Barton, Anything Is Possible, and Olive, Again, have continued her exploration of family loyalties, loneliness, and the complicated ways people inhabit one another’s lives.
Sharing 6 of her all-time favorite books with The Week, Strout’s list moves through much of the same themes of her writing. From the pulsating honesty of James Baldwin’s portrait of a Greenwich Village jazz drummer to Kurt Vonnegut’s delicate handling of PTSD through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, dive into her recommendations below, and complement with the bookshelves of Ann Patchett and Rachel Cusk.
Elizabeth Strout’s Reading List
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai (also rec’d by Richey Edwards)
“This book just blew me away because of its voice. It’s an account, written in three notebooks, of a man in Japan whose sense of alienation is so profound that he attempts suicide. Others might consider the book relentlessly grim, but I love it because that voice is so strong and so pure.” -ES
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (also rec’d by Gabriel García Márquez, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Fosse & Nia DaCosta)
“I have re-read this book every few years from the time I was in my 20s, and I am always so interested how different it seems each time. Clarissa Dalloway — deciding to get the flowers herself, as the book opens — seemed in my youth to be a lovely woman. As I grew older, I saw more and more the sadness that beats in her heart. And Septimus Smith and his wife provide such a wonderful, and tragic, juxtaposition to her life of luxury.” -ES
Another Country by James Baldwin (also rec’d by RATM & Richey Edwards)
“Many years ago, when I first read Baldwin’s 1962 novel about a doomed Greenwich Village jazz drummer, I thought, ‘Wow, I can’t believe it. The narrator is so fierce and strong, and the book pulsates with such honesty. The language — !'” -ES
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (also rec’d by Gene Wilder)
“I have loved Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War epic since I was 17, and each time I come back to it, it always surprises me. I’m also interested in the fact that many of his sentences are actually much longer than we tend to remember. They go many places in this book.” -ES
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro (also rec’d by Jonathan Franzen & Sam Altman)
“Munro brings such great authority to the page that I will follow her anywhere. And she takes me many places; I am never disappointed. In the title story, for example, she moves the point of view with such ease all around a small Canadian prairie town.” -ES
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
“I came to this book later in life. I think it is, among other things, the loveliest, most delicate account of post-traumatic stress I’ve ever read — like the water that simply runs from the eyes of Billy Pilgrim.” -ES
(via The Week; photo by Leonard Cendamo)
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