The Bottom Line: 'My Name Is Lucy Barton' By Elizabeth Strout

In the waning pages of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, the title character and narrator recalls advice she was given by a famous author from whom she took a creative writing workshop. “[R]ecording this now I think of something Sarah Payne had said at the writing class in Arizona. ‘You will have only one story,’ she had said. ‘You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.’” It’s an inverse of the old saw that ever...