Now on bbc news talking books. Welcome to hay festival, now celebrating its 30th year. Hay brings together scientists, historians, novelists, musicians, all of them here to discuss their latest ideas and stories. Today im interviewing the multi Award Winning author elizabeth strout. Her six novels, all of them have received critical acclaim, but it was Olive Kitteridge that received the prestigious pulitzer prize. Born and raised in small towns in New Hampshire and maine, her latest book Anything Is Possible explores a cast of extraordinary characters and their own small town lives. Applause i stand to be corrected, but i think it was chekhov who was asked by, i think his brother, it was a hint about writing, and he apparently said, you know, the thing about writing is find the small detail that reveals the big story. I think elizabeth strout, if i may say so, follows in that tradition because what she does is tell the story of small individual lives and yet they seem to reveal a massive truth about the human condition, about the american human condition. And certainly this, her latest book, Anything Is Possible, follows in that tradition. I read somewhere that you said, its not good or bad that interests me as a writer, but the murkiness of Human Experience and the consistent imperfection of our lives. We might want to talk about that in a little while. Anyway, here is elizabeth strout, her book is Anything Is Possible. Applause. Thank you. Elizabeth, reading your books, one thing struck me, the extent to which geography shapes your characters, shapes the people, shapes the people you write about. Just describe some geography for us and how you think that shapes your people. I think place is very important in literature because we all live in a place, so wherever our place happens to be, whether its a city or rural or maine, which is both rural and non city, or the midwest, we all live in a place and the place is part of who we are. And the time in history that we live in is also who we are. But i have written mostly about maine because i came from maine many, many years ago and i came from many generations of maine. But with Anything Is Possible and my name is lucy barton, i put them in the midwest, which is its own kind of geography. Theres nothing but sky in the midwest itsjust sky, sky, sky. And when i wrote my name is lucy barton, as soon as i understood that her mother had never been on a plane before, something about that made me realise, 0k, i see lucy as having grown up in a tiny, little house, surrounded by sky, and so thats her place of origin and then she moved and left and ended up living in New York City and crossed all these class lines. So is this what we people talk about the flyover states, you fly over and forget about it. So in a sense youre talking about forgotten places and people . Yes, exactly. Do you mind reading a little extract . The book isjust studded Anything Is Possible, lucy barton, Olive Kitteridge too, the book is just studded with place and geography. I think youve got a passage that does it for us. This is just from the very first part, where the man who used to be the janitor in lucy bartons school is driving around. This morning tommy drove slowly to the town of carlisle for errands. It was a sunny day saturday in may and his wifes 82nd birthday was just a few days away. All around him were open fields. The corn newly planted and the soyabeans too. A number of fields were still brown, as theyd been ploughed if the under for their planting, but mostly there was the high blue sky with a few white clouds scattered near the horizon. The barton family had been outcasts, even in a town like amgash. Their extreme poverty and strangeness making this so. The oldest man, a man named pete, lived alone in their house now. The middle child was two towns away and the youngest, lucy barton, had fled many years ago. Thank you. So, we think, here in england, in britain, that we know america, and yet i think reading your books you suddenly understand theres lots of america we dont know. When we look at america we see it through the big events, the elections and so on, maybe. Right. Just to get an idea of these people who populate your book, lets say last years election, which we all followed, would your people be trump people or clinton people . Laughter. Well, the people i write about. Yes. Laughter and applause. Make that very clear. The people that i write about in this particular book, Anything Is Possible, if they bothered to vote, some of them would have probably voted for trump. But what is it about them, what would drive them towards that . Is It Relationship to authority, relationship to power . Well, ive always been interested in class in america and we dont talk about class in america that much, but it certainly is there. And as far as im concerned, all my work has been about class but in my name is lucy barton i really pushed it to an extreme and i made her come from great poverty and then she herself crossed class lines, which is a very american story and she ended up arguably a middle class woman and i kept thinking, what does that feel like for her . But going back to her home of origin, amgash, these people are Working Class or even lower than that in some ways. Theyre lower Working Class. And if you think about class not necessarily in terms of education, which is obviously a part of it, and not even in terms of income, but in terms of the power people feel over the destiny of their lives, then these are people who feel powerless. What is it about you that made you want to give voice to these people, these flyover people, people you dont normally hear from . Yeah, im just so interesting ordinary people, the most ordinary lives you can find. I am just so interested in ordinary people. And so, as ive written my way through my career, ifind myself drawn more and more to the lives that dont have a voice. These are people who. Theyre just living their lives and they dont have a voice and i wonder about their internal lives, because All Of Us Have Our Interior lives and they come up against, you know, the external world and its just always so interesting to me how we walk around with all of our different multitudes of thoughts and feelings and then interact with the world. So these people who have just the most ordinary lives, im just so curious, what is it theyre feeling or thinking and living through . So when lucy barton comes back and goes back home after 17 years, shes doing much more. What is she doing . Shes definitely crossing geography. Right. Youre saying shes Crossing Class . Right. Right. And shes also crossing wealth, because she plays a welfare role in her family. She does. She has become a successful new york maybe upper middle class woman, so to speak, and she does go back after 17 years of not being home and visits her siblings in her childhood home. Her brother has lived there all of his life alone and he cleans the house for her, which is. Buys a new rug. Yeah, he buys a new rug, he wants it to look nice for her. And then her sister pays a visit and she is quite confrontational and angry about whats the story, why did you bother to come home . Sorry, i find that interesting. The three of them are together, 17 years theyve been apart. But no one is celebrating what lucys achieved. No, no. Because in this sort of environment, and i know this from having come from maine, which is a similar sort of background, because the white protestant people from maine that have lived there forever, as my family has, some of them moved to the midwest a couple of hundred years ago and theres a similar kind of person. The point is that if you pull attention to yourself then thats really disgusting, youre just not supposed to do that. So nobodys going to praise lucy. So it wasnt envy and jealousy, it was just that. Well, she thinks she is better. Well, they think she thinks shes better. She fled and she became somebody different and thats just not what youre supposed to do. Who does she think she is . She doesnt do that. Lucy barton herself doesnt shes not flaunting her wealth or her success. No, shes trying to be pleasant. You said you were interested in ordinary lives and ordinary people. But the book is anything but ordinary, it seems to me. Theres child abuse, post Traumatic Stress syndrome, theres obesity, the character who calls herself i think fatty patty, marital infidelity, sexual anxiety, voyeurism. I mean, this isnt life as. In our sheltered way, this isnt life as we know it. Really . You mightjust ask some people in the audience. I wouldnt dare you go ahead and ask. No, im just saying. Just saying that it might be a little more ordinary than we think. More common . Yes, yes, yes. You dont get. I mean, its quite depressing. You know, i wonder if in writing this, i mean, how did it affect you . Because its a very very troubled lives, arent they . Right. I didnt find it depressing myself. I loved these people, i always love everybody i write about. One of the fun things for me in writing is that when i go to the page i dont judge my characters and its just so freeing, because in real life We Arejudgemental and itjust gets. We arejudgemental. Yeah, i mean people are, and its so tiresome. So when i go to the page ijust transcend it and ijust think, here are these people, i love them, let me watch what theyre doing, let me record what theyre doing. So i dont find their lives depressing, ifind their lives real to me and so i record them. Theres one character, Charlie Mccauley in the book, who says beneath it all people were rats, scurrying off to find garbage to eat. Again, i thought it was a very harshjudgement. They may be small lives, but in their own way. Actually, and i know you think this, in their own way they are trying to make the best best of it. Exactly. Well, Charlie Mccauley, who thinks that, has been in vietnam and he has been completely decimated because of his experiences in the war a number of years ago. Im very interested in the idea that certain men can go to war and can manage it and certain men go to war and they cant manage it and lucys father could not do it and thats what ruined his life. And with Charlie Mccauley, i wanted it reverberate, i wanted it to reverberate, the sense that this man in a later war, he just couldnt do those things that he had to do, and so his life had been damaged irrevocably. I read somewhere that you knew you were going to be a writer, or wanted to be a writer, at 16, and yet yourfirst book didnt come out. Till i was a3. 43. I was going to say in your 405. So was that an apprenticeship . Obviously 16 is very young. I actually wanted to be a writer since i was about four, actually. So about a0 years of apprenticeship. I was writing at a very young age. My mother gave me notebooks and said, write down what you did today, so i would. I thought in terms of sentences and i knew i was a writer from a very, very young age and then ijust didnt. Ijust couldnt get it right. I couldnt find the muscular enough sentence to convey what i needed to convey to the reader. I couldnt do it until. People say in your prose nothing is wasted. Every word counts. That was a craft you tried to develop . I kept doing it and doing it. You mentioned the book my name is lucy barton, essentially about the relationship between a mother and daughter. In it theres a point at which the daughter is in hospital, hasnt seen her mum for years and years, suddenly she wakes up in hospital and marmie, as she calls her, is there and in the space of i think five days they Start Talking and trying to understand and learn more about each other. But, again, there is this pathos in this at least quite early on. She wakes up and says, marmie, why did you come here . Says lucy. Answer, there is none. At least not straightaway. Right. Well, that is her mother. What can you do . There are some others that are not as communicative as others. There are some mothers that are not as communicative as others. Her mother has her own story, as well. But my particular feeling is that these are two people that love each other very much. It is such a problematic relationship. There are many problems within their relationship. When i wrote my name is lucy barton, i made it porous in a way because i want readers to bring their own Life Experiences to my books, and they will. I mean, you will bring your Life Experience to any book you read. But the more that is written, the more difficult it is for a reader to enter into the text itself. The hospital is in new york. So we are now in the city. At one point in the book, i think lucy barton thinks of this, and she says she discovers the way some people in the city have a depth of disgust city people feel for the truly provincial. It felt to me like you were very much the kind of country girl, do you really feel that about the city . I do think that, yes, and i have lived in the city for 35 years. I have lived in New York City for 35 years. I love the city but i think that there are people in New York City who do feel a sense of repulsion for the truly provincial. But what do they mean by the truly provincial . Because they are ill educated . What do they find difficult . Clothes have a lot to do with that. Clothes . Yes. Im serious. The way a person dresses in new york is not the way people dress in maine, which is obvious when she wears her mother of the groom dress. In Olive Kitteridge. Dress is a very distinctive way of letting people know you are not really from the city, or, as a friend of mine said recently, isaid, you know, my daughter, who has been born and raised in new york, my daughter told me you cannot wear pink any more. And my friend, who was also born and raised in New York City, said, shes just trying to urbanise you. We are told that in america, there isnt class. Well, there is. Why do americans insist . Are they trying to persuade themselves . They are trying to convince themselves that there is no class. At this moment in history, class will be talked about more, because of the political situation. It has to be talked about more and people are beginning to recognise it as a real thing. But i think the whole American Dream idea that we will accept anybody and we will, or did. Do you think anything has fundamentally changed . We will see. When you talk about. Go on, say it. I cant. Applause i am going to say. When you talk about this deep disgust that city people have, is that also why so many people in, how should i put it, metropolitan america, the shock and horror that went around when donald trump got elected . Right. Because they lived in a bubble. They didnt know people who would vote for donald trump. And so they thought. And this is so interesting because a number of years ago, i did realise that new yorkers were provincial in their own way. Right. And they are. Because they think that the way that they think is the only way to think. And isnt that what we would think of as provincial . What happens to you, the 35 years of new york you have under your skin, what happens to you when you go back to maine . Laughter. Well. People say hi. And i say, hi and they say how are you doing . That is just their nature. It is entirely a different culture. It is very interesting to me. I think because they have lived there as long as any american has lived in america, and the culture is so distinctly isolated, and there is a sense of isolation. There is community, but it is really about the individual. Itjust is. There is a sense of taciturnity and individual stuff. It reminds me Ofjohn Cheever from massachusetts, and his mother wrote to him and said, johnny, how come you have not told me you have been winning all these prizes . And he said because i thought you would be ashamed of me. I thought you would think i was bragging. I read that and i got that. I understand that. I dont know if this is right, but you up probably best known but you are probably best known for Olive Kitteridge. Probably. It is about a cantankerous old woman, for those who have not read it. It seemed to me like a lot of the book you spent hating her, god she is awful. If i was the husband, i would have run away. And then suddenly, i liked her. And i thought, when did strout do that . Yes . How did that happen . You always liked her, i presume. I always loved her. I knew she was badly behaved. I was aware of that. Describe what she does to her Daughter In Law on the day of her wedding day. She steals her Daughter In Laws bra and one shoe so that the Daughter In Law can feel crazy when she doesnt find the other shoe. And she marks her sweater. That was a fun day at work. I have to tell you. I had no idea that was going to happen. She does it because the Daughter In Law has insulted her dress. And olive was so excited by the dress, she made it by hand, it was floral and pretty and she overhears the Daughter In Law insulting the dress. And itjust ignites her into action. But let me tell you something. When i went on the road with Olive Kitteridge, so many women leaned into me and said confidentially, laughter. So i am just saying. A lot of women want to do this. Laughter. Ladies and gentlemen, elizabeth strout. Thank you so much. Its not exactly been ideal this weekend on the Weather Front but perhaps the weather is a little kinder to you today than yesterday. It might be the other way around. It really is that changeable across the uk. Here is a nice picture from worcestershire, some blue skies, clouds there as well. I will show you the Satellite Picture on the radar, we have cloud and rain across the southern counties here, a mix of both blue skies and Shower Clouds in the heart of the uk, and then just cloud and rain and cool weather for the north east and eastern parts of scotland. A real mixed bag across the uk. Lets see what the evening is looking like. Actually, across cornwall, devon and western parts of wales and the south too here, its not looking bad at all. At this stage i suspect most of the showers, or the greatest risk of catching them, will be a little bit further towards the east. And here, from, say, sunderland through yorkshire down into manchester its just overcast with outbreaks of rain. Very nice evening for northern ireland, so you are doing well here, and the Western Isles also, very pleasant weather conditions, a bit like yesterday. So, Western Scotland has been enjoying some fine weather so far this weekend. Tonight, there is certainly a difference between the east and the west. In the west we have clearer weather, whereas in the east we have this Weather Front with some cloud and spots of rain, so anywhere from newcastle through the midlands down into the south its going to be damp. This low pressure that has been over us all weekend is in a process of exiting, moving away towards the east, so the weather is opening up. Its clearing up from the west. So that means that many Western Areas tomorrow, a beautiful day, whereas clearly in the east you can see the cloud and the breeze and some spots of rain, that means there will be a huge temperature contrast as well. Temperatures only 18, 19 there. 20 in london. Possibly even as high as 25 in glasgow. A stunning day on the way for glasgow and belfast as well. Overall, this week, the best of the weather will be on tuesday. That is, most of us will be enjoying sunny spells and some warmth. By the time we get to wednesday, the weather will go downhill and we are expecting rain throughout the country on wednesday sweeping through, an increasing breeze, and on thursday it looks like it will be a fresher and more blustery day. So, the week ahead, very changeable, thats for sure, the wettest day will be wednesday and its going to stay a little on the cool side. Bye bye. This is bbc news. The headlines at five more than a0 of the bbcs best known Women Broadcasters have written to the corporations Director General demanding he act now to tackle the gender pay gap. Theres been legislation about all this since 1970. Its got to stop and weve got to do something about it really, really quickly. A 20 year old man has died after being confronted by a Police Officer in a london shop. Regrets about a final phone call 20 years after the death of diana, william and harry open up about the relationship with their mother in a documentary marking the anniversary of her death. Also cycling into the history books britains chris froome will confirm his fourth Tour De France title later when the race ends on the champs elysees. And can england hold off india in
vimarsana.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.