Learning from Garlic:

My Name is Lucy Barton

When I was twenty-one, that giant of literary criticism, Roland Barthes, helped me divide the books on my shelf in a new way: into those that are writerly, and those that are readerly. He did so via an undergraduate literary theory course, which opened my eyes to how language works and allowed me to grasp some of the meanings of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, for which I will forever be grateful. I say ‘grasp some’, because Nelson’s text contains the potential for a multitude of readings and I am only equipped to embark on some of them. For this reason, Barthes would classify The Argonauts as a writerly text. I would too, but that’s not what I’m writing about here. What I’m writing about here is Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton and what I learnt from it.