Oh, William

Oh William! (2021) by Elizabeth Strout is the sequel to the Man Booker longlisted and New York Times bestselling novel My Name is Lucy Barton (2016). Strout is also the author of six other books, including the Pulitzer-prize winning Olive Kitteridge (2008).

Oh William! features the previous novel’s first-person protagonist Lucy Barton at a later stage in life when she is 63, a successful writer, and widowed from her second marriage.

While the first novel’s topic was chiefly selfhood, William! centers on the emotional dynamics of marriage and divorce and the effects of history and geography on personal identity.

This study guide references the Viking Print Edition of the novel published in 2021.

Please be advised, this novel includes references to an eating disorder and self-harm.

Plot Summary

In the wake of being widowed from her second marriage to David Abramson, Lucy Barton, a successful 63-year-old writer and mother of two grown-up daughters, is summoned to the aid of her ex-husband William Gerhardt. William, a physically fit 71-year-old parasitology researcher, is beset with problems. One problem is that his third wife Estelle has left him, taking their 10-year-old daughter and much of his furniture. Bewildered, William turns his attention to his other problem: the discovery that his mother, Catherine Cole, had a daughter from her first marriage to a potato-farmer in Maine. Catherine left her first husband to marry William’s father, Wilhelm Gerhardt, a prisoner of war who fought on the German side during WWII.

William invites Lucy on a trip to Maine to meet his lost half-sister, Lois Bubar. Lucy agrees to go because she still cares for William and welcomes the distraction from her grief over David. When they arrive in Maine, William puts off meeting Lois and he and Lucy drive around the desolate landscape where Lois grew up and raised her family. They go to the local library at Houlton where the librarian shows them pictures of William’s father Wilhelm during his POW years. Lucy, who grew up in a tiny house in the middle of an Illinois soybean field, panics at the empty Maine landscape, which reminds her of the isolation of her unhappy and impoverished childhood. Even though she is a successful writer who has lived in New York most of her adult life, the return to a rural setting inspires the same feelings of invisibility and worthlessness that predominated during her years of deprivation. Lucy realizes that while her education and association with William’s family gave her middle-class privileges, her inability to stay in touch with her family of origin caused another form of isolation and depression. She recalls Catherine’s continual insistence that Lucy came from nothing, and that Catherine called her a piece of “trash” on her deathbed. Still, Lucy realizes that William has his own issues with his mother, who he felt rejected him. This has caused him to feel rejected by women, even as he has continually sought their comfort in his three marriages and extramarital affairs.

William is too timid to meet Lois, so he asks Lucy to go in advance. Lucy finds that Lois is both proud and resilient; however, her hurt over Catherine’s abandonment manifests in resentment and the cold treatment she gave Catherine when she sought Lois out. Lois, a close reader of Lucy’s books, was also hurt at being left out of Lucy’s memoir and at the fact that William did not know of her existence until going on an ancestry website. Lois refuses to meet William.

Feeling the sting of Lois’s rejection, William disappears for a few weeks when they return to New York, distracting himself with an unsuitable woman. Meanwhile, Lucy confronts the loss of David and the terrifying childhood feelings the Maine trip brought up. When William asks Lucy to accompany him on a trip to the Cayman Islands, she is bemused. She realizes that William does not have the aura of authority and protection that he once held for her. However, she agrees to accompany him anyway out of compassion.