Her early novels were rejected until Amy and Isabelle (1998), about a tricky mother/daughter relationship, turned out to be a hit and was made into a TV film in 2001. Until recently, she spent half her time in Manhattan but now lives in Maine full-time with her second husband, James Tierney, a former state attorney general (they met when he turned up at a reading of hers and they married in 2011). Finally, I found my own way of story-telling It feels absurdly easy to talk to her, as if we were catching up after a long gap.Įverything I wrote was slightly better than before but not good enough. Strout is sitting in what I guess to be her study, with pale yellow walls, books and paintings – a calm, civilised room. We confess to a dislike at having to look at ourselves on screen and reassure each other we look fine. She is talking on Zoom – and as women of more or less the same age (she is 65), we find ourselves bonding instantly, commenting on our lame reflexes with technology, marvelling that we are able to talk at what seems an arm’s stretch and with the Atlantic between us. But did she ever find out what was in Linney’s mind? “Laura has no memory of the moment at all, she was in her zone, doing whatever she was doing,” she laughs. Oh William! became the title of her new book and it has all the familiar pleasures of her writing: the clean prose, the slow reveals, the wisdom – what Hilary Mantel once described as “an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue” – the qualities that led to Strout winning the Pulitzer for fiction. Strout, overhearing, exclaimed: “Oh William!” It was as if Linney had given her permission: she would write another Lucy Barton novel because William deserved a story of his own.

Linney stepped into the rehearsal space, pushed her spectacles on to the top of her head and started to murmur something about her character’s ex-husband – William. T hree years ago, Elizabeth Strout was in New York sitting in on rehearsals for the stage version of her novel My Name Is Lucy Barton (a show that came to the Bridge theatre in London, directed by Richard Eyre) and was watching Laura Linney, an actor for whom she has the fondest regard, inch her way into the part.

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