Oh William - Elizabeth Strout: Review

This book was a classical cover buy. I bought it and in my mind I was already scolding myself for it. 

Judging a book by its cover is probably a judgement not well thought through. And I am not pretending that this one was. This time, fortunately for me, this was a total success.

Oh William is told by Lucy, the ex wife of William. Throughout the story it becomes apparent  that the reason she is writing about him is not because she is in love with him but because he is a mystery to her. 

Weirdly enough I can‘t tell you much about the book. It feels like one of those books that when you finish you get the feeling that the story totally got over your head and you didn‘t even grasp a splitter of all the topics. Although, I probably didn‘t get everything, I think, the topics that I got were the topics that spoke to me because they were meant to do so. What I want to say is, that I sensed all the topics out that are relevant in my life. If I read the book in three years, I feel find and understand different topics. 

Lucy, although the story is about William, tells with her story more about her than one might expect. This book depicts the complicated thoughts and feelings one has towards different kind of relationships with people. At times its painful, at times its mean. But it always felt real and raw. I didn‘t feel like Lucy‘s friend, I felt like I was in Lucy‘s unfiltered thoughts. We as readers, get the intimate inside on her thoughts that she isn‘t sharing with anyone. 

I am trying to think what made me so hooked about this book. It most definitely wasn‘t the mild plot of the story. I didn‘t care as much about William and what was happening to him as I cared about how Lucy perceived all those incidents and how she reacted to them. What was especially interesting (and reminded me a bit of Tolstoy‘s Anna Karenina) was the occasional conflict and discrepancy between her inner self and her external behaviour. At times I wanted to take Lucy in my arms and tell her that she is enough. She didn‘t talk about herself in a manner that would make the reader feel like her goal is to make us pity her. And at no point during reading did I feel pity for her, I felt empathy, I felt like I understand and I was sad for her. Despite her being so delicate in her thoughts and feelings, she never gave an impression of weakness. 

For me Oh William was a bout Lucy trying to figure out who William is and at the same time who she was when she was with him. It is maybe also about a woman trying to understand how she is perceived by herself rather than other people. It is about a woman, a writer, a mother, a widow, a wife, an ex wife and so on. It is about Lucy and her relationships that are intertwined with her family and it all comes down about her being a complex person.