“Amy and Isabelle” by Elizabeth Strout (post 2): How are novels written? How was this novel written? Who wrote it?

Isabelle, 33, is the mother of Amy, 16. They live together in a small town of the far northeastern USA, the part of the country where Strout was born (with Boston to the south and Canada to the north). They are the central characters of this “novel of shining integrity and humor, about bravery and hard choices of what is called ordinary life” (back-cover blurb by Canadian Nobel Prize winner, Alice Munro).

“Isabelle sighed deeply. It surprised her sometimes how absorbed she could become in something that was not happening. (What was happening? Nothing. She was sitting in a chair in a silent house and had been sitting there for quite some time)” (1, p. 205), which would appear to be the character’s reflection on the author’s writing process.

The narrator says that Amy “had become desperate, crazy, somebody else” (1, p. 68). The conventional interpretation here is that this teenage girl has become infatuated with an older man. But it wasn’t necessary for the author to phrase it in multiple personality terms—as Amy’s becoming “somebody else”—unless that reflected the author’s psychology.

One of Amy’s friends says, “Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m schizophrenic [she meant multiple personality] and so am I…My father [a psychologist] thinks that’s funny” (1, p. 106). Why was this old multiple personality joke thrown in. It is gratuitous, and is present only as something on the author’s mind.

Isabelle “wished she could stop the part of her mind where the hidden pieces about Amy lay. She wished she could stop picturing certain things. Sometimes sitting at her typewriter she would squeeze her eyes closed and pray” (1, p. 152).

“The part of her mind where the pieces…lay” is a way of saying that a “part” (common euphemism for alternate personality) has its own separate memory bank. The typewriter (Isabelle is a secretary) reinforces the idea that any implicit reference to multiple personality is an implicit reference to the author (who uses a typewriter). “She wished she could stop picturing things” suggests that the story is coming to the author, not from the author (author in the sense of her regular personality).

“…who was Isabelle Goodrow?…She didn’t know herself. She didn’t think this was Isabelle Goodrow” (1, p. 180). This was after the scene (see below) in which Isabelle had violently cut Amy’s hair. Who, then, was it, who committed that violent act, an alternate personality?

Six-minute Video Interview (2)

The author says the writing of this novel started with an unexplained image. She doesn’t say which scene, but it may be the one in which Isabelle, after discovering Amy’s sexual involvement with a teacher, violently cuts off much of her daughter’s golden hair. Then the process of the rest of the writing of this novel was “spending time with these characters,” finding out about them, and understanding what that initial image had been all about. She often worried that she wouldn’t learn enough about Isabelle.

In other words, as I commented above, the creative process did not start with an idea for a story about characters she had manufactured, at least that is not how she experienced it. Yet that initial image had to come from somewhere in her mind. And those coherent characters had to have been created by some kind of intelligent process in her mind.

But to the author’s regular personality, the story and characters were—to borrow a phrase from Stephen King about his own creative process—“found objects.” I would say they were produced by the author’s alternate personalities for her regular personality to find (subject, of course, to editing and revision).

1. Elizabeth Strout. Amy and Isabelle. New York, Random House, 1998.

2. Charlie Rose (interviewer). “A conversation with author Elizabeth Strout about her novel, “Amy and Isabelle” https://charlierose.com/videos/2289

Search “Strout” to see a brief previous post in which she is quoted about her writing process.