Welcome to the bookcase. I am Kate Gibson.

And I'm Charlie Gibson, her father, and she's in a giggly mood today. You'll just have to put up with it.

I am. I'm going to be a little giggly today. I'm a bit punchy. It's probably because I have a lot of, I have a bunch of schoolwork due today. So there's been a lot of late nights. So my apologies, if I sound a little punchy. We're really excited about it. I don't think anyone cares, Kate. No one cares. Anyway, it's world's smallest violin. Anyway, today we're really excited about our author. It's Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning, Elizabeth Strout,

who's releasing the third book in her Lucy Barton series. The first one was my name is Lucy Barton.

The second one, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which I'm really excited about,

is O'William. But she's also written Olive Kittrich, which, you know, won a Pulitzer,

nothing to sneeze out there. She wrote Olive again. She has quite a canon. And I love Lucy by the Sea. It is my favorite of the three

books so far, although I have really loved the first two. The Lucy series is wonderful. And we

should point out Lucy by the Sea, which is just out, is you don't need to read the first two to get Lucy by the sea, but it helps. And she has such a very specific voice, Lucy, I mean, that follows through all three of the books. This is a character that I love, and her characters are so vivid, and what is

amazing to me is she can make them so vivid without long, descriptive paragraphs. She writes in

short bursts, and as somebody who wrote for television, where you have to write very sparsely

and get it all in in a minute 40. Her little

bursts of writing tell you so much and then what they don't say tells you so much. She has a

very particular style. She is to me a rock star in the field of writing. Her books are wonderful. I remember learning about negative space

from, you know, when I was in our history class from the Matisse cutouts. By looking at the paper

cutouts, you make just as much use of the negative space as you do in the positive space.

She does that with the Lucy Barton books. I called it in the interview elliptical writing. The things she

chooses to share with you is Lucy Barton and the things she chooses to hold to herself. And that's a big

theme in Elizabeth Stroud's book is can you really ever know another person, whether you're married to

them, whether they're your sister, your brother, your mother, your father. Can you ever really

know a person? And I

think that's sort of fascinating. And you mentioned, too, that Lucy has idioms. And I love that about

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