Story:

William has three divorced marriage, First is Lucy, second is Pam Carlson, third is Estelle, Estelle’s daughter is Bridget. And Willaim has affair with Joanne.

William’s mother is Catherine, a drinker, William’s father is the jobless prisoner of Nazi. Lucy and William has 2 daughters: Chrissy with eating disorder,autistic and go for spcialist and the other daughter is Becka

Lucy’s second marriage is David, cellist.

Lucy’s family is very poor. Lucy’s father is veteran of the war.

Whats the different from Lucy and William is that Lucy comes from a poorer family.

Lucy’s brother and sister run into the circle of murkey life, Lucy always so exuberant!

William’s ex-sister is Lois, a teacher, her husband is a dentist

William’s brother die in prision

William’s friends are Richard Baxter and Amish

Highlights vs self- reflection:

1.p.221:I have never had a feeling of belonging to any group of people, and what had just come to me was an understanding, But I did not tell that to William, who came from Newton, Massachusetts, and not the poor town of Amgash, Illinois, as I had, and who had lived in New York City for so many years. I had lived in New York City for years as well, but William inhabited it—his tailored suits—and I felt that I had never inhabited New York as he had. Because I never had.

2.p.225: people are lonely

3.p.235: I looked at the concrete that was left and there were green leaves that came down over it, and the sun shone and made the green leaves glint in the sun, and then I felt a sort of a lurch in my head, and everything that Ralph was saying was something that I knew he would be saying. What I mean is that right before a word came from his mouth, I knew what the word would be. They were not important words, only about how the place had been constructed and what they had used for insulation.

4.p.237: A woman who was a client of hers

5.p.239When Chrissy was born I received a letter from my mother—I had not told her I was pregnant—and she wrote, You have a new baby girl, I had a vision of you holding a baby blanket and I knew it was a girl.

6.p.243: I felt a happiness, is what I am saying. And it made me think again about the memory of me driving as a young child next to my father in his truck.

7.p.244: a mutual apology. This may sound strange, but it is not strange to William and to me. It is part of the fabric of who we are.

Understanding and mutual apology helps us not so alone any more.

8.p.246: ‘What happened in Germany is very bad. I’m not ashamed of being German, but I am ashamed of what the country did.’”

We have no choice to be born but we have the choice to be a better person.

9.p.264: familiarity so dense it filled up the room, your throat almost clogged with knowledge of the other so that it seemed to practically press into your nostrils—the odor of the other’s thoughts, the self-consciousness of every spoken word, the slight flicker of an eyebrow slightly raised, the barely perceptible tilting of the chin; no one but the other would know what it meant; but you could not be free living like that, not ever.

10.p.287 Whoever became the loneliest first would give in.

11.p.290: a person really choose something? Just somthine chose us! We follow, not chose!

12.p.293: “Lucy, everyone is mean in their head.

13.p.294: “Anyway, you’re never mean for long, you always apologize.”

14.p.295“There’s a life cycle to everything.”

15.p.296 “ I’m old, she’s older. I mean, what’s the point.”

16.p.300: “I’d cry every day at that place. And all the other kids were a year older than I was, they seemed huge to me.” He waited, and then he said, “Lucy, I would cry—and the kids would circle around me at recess and they’d sing, ‘Crybaby, crybaby.’”

17.p.326: sunlight pouring through

No matter what going on, the sun always shine on us

18.p.328:  “I told you we came here to investigate my husband’s—my former husband’s” find the root , cure the plant

19.p.390: I love you more than God

20.p.392:He got triple whammy, but no boday feels it

21.p.412: Lucy’s sister and brother lives in a murkey life, but Lucy keeps herself exuberan!

22.p.418: find way out after grow up

23.p.421: My point is that there is a cultural blank spot that never ever leaves, only it is not a spot, it is a huge blank canvas and it makes life very frightening.

 It is as though William ushered me into the world

Everyone come to our life is a mentor we invited

24.p.447 But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too?

 Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!

 Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.

 But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

 This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

25.p.445:one child one way and another different way

Golden Sentence:

1.glazed

2.hash

3.dork

4. she pursed her red lipsticked lips.

5. William’s face shone with appreciation.

6. schistosomiasis

7. furtively

8. self-absorbed

9. you impinged on my privacy

10. contrite

11. grumpy septuagenarian

12.intricate

13. William is philandering, careless

14. aphids

15. laconically                 

16.autistic

17. exuberance

18. What came to me immediately was a sprinkling of dismalness that descended

19. “citified”

20. Philharmonic

21. Later he said it seemed almost providential.

22. I had a slight trepidation run through me, and it was a strange feeling

23. William finally looked at me beseechingly.

24. dickwad,

Conclusion:

1.We are lonely, marriage is a way to forget we are lonely. From understanding and apology , we feel we are not alone.

2.We bumped into rock of authority which is not love but surrender with strongly commitment and understanding

3. David and Lucy comes from different background, but have same insularity that bind their marriage.

4. it’s not important how they left, but what they left

5. Lucy can’t forget her love to David: Never in a thousand years would he have laughed at me. Never. For anything.

6.silence is the sign of loneliness

7. Who felt loneliness, give in first, then we will feel cozy waving in between.

8. deep in our heart, we have a crybaby, need to have someone to hear and cure

9. understaind comes from sharing

10. Yet, the two share a bond. With a different character, one justifiably blind with rage from William’s cheating and manipulation, William would be rendered one dimensional, all of his clambering to understand himself, the slices of vulnerability with which he is often depicted—“I saw him from afar and I saw that his khakis were too short… A little bit this broke my heart”—would be lost.

Lucy’s tone is contemplative. She starts to narrate an event, hesitates, and decides against telling it. Sometimes, she pauses a story mid-action to tell another. It is, however, never careless. There is the thoroughness of a master filmmaker in Strout’s arrangement of the vignettes that make up the book. The past and present meet in illuminating ways. The structure of the book mimics that of a mind remembering, trying not to remember, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding. For example, one often forgets that Lucy’s dearly beloved husband has recently passed, and then one is jerked awake when a memory of him is inserted without prompt.

Strout has woven a tale of two people in significant moments of their lives, picking with precision and earnestness deepening and incisive moments to lead readers to the poignant sentences that end the book: “But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.” One finishes Oh William! with the sense that being alive is a difficult, complex process, and that everyone is trying, grasping. Perhaps this sentiment crumbles soon after, as one drops the book and turns on the television to the news of thousands of people dying, losing their homes and families due to decisions made by powerful people. But in the moment, we are urged on by Lucy to choose compassion for others and for ourselves.

1.      Lucy and Lois face the departure of the be loved hub and get cured from each other’s caring

2.      Lois came from trash with a drinker mom Catherine and jobless , abusive prisoner of German father Gerhardt, and raised by Marilyn.

13,Lucy talked with Lois, William’s secret sister but Lois didn’t have the mood to see William that her mom mentioned about him before. Lucy just mentioned about he has divorced twice, not mentioned about his third divorce. Lois and William never get a chance to share their feeling, just through Lucy’s book or website

14.William chose the same destiny likfe his mom, Everyone left, only self alone left

15.Lucy and William’s mom comes from the same background, but Lucy is so exuberant and in a good spirit. Always so joyful that William is so in fond of her. Lucy is a heart stealer to William

16. Fathers are all the soliders(veteran of the Vietnam War vs prisoner of German) and mothers are all poor, they both are all successful, so called American Dreams

17.Everyone is a gift to our life

18. Except three divoreced women, one more woman- his sister, Lois, is rejected William,either.

19.He lost his authority

20 We always learned something till it was too late, but better than never

21.I enjoy reading self-reflective philosophy

Related reading

1.https://www.quora.com/Why-is-grief-such-a-silent-and-lonely-emotion

2.https://www.southeastreview.org/single-post/book-review-oh-william

3.Pam Carlson: https://www.artmajeur.com/pastelpam

4. Cayman Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayman_Islands

Questions by Clive:

January Book Club Meeting and Questions.

In the wake of being widowed from her second marriage to David Abramson, Lucy Barton, a successful 63-year-old writer and mother of two grown-up daughters, is summoned to the aid of her ex-husband William Gerhardt. William, a physically fit 71-year-old parasitological’ researcher, is a man burdened with problems. One problem is that his third wife Estelle has left him, taking their 10-year-old daughter and much of his furniture. Bewildered, William turns his attention to his other problem: the discovery that his mother, Catherine Cole, had a daughter from her first marriage to a potato-farmer in Maine. Catherine left her first husband to marry William’s father, Wilhelm Gerhardt, a prisoner of war who fought on the German side during WWII.

William invites Lucy on a trip to Maine to meet his lost half-sister, Lois Bubar. Lucy agrees to go because she still cares for William and welcomes the distraction from her grief over David. When they arrive in Maine, William puts off meeting Lois and he and Lucy drive around the desolate landscape where Lois grew up and raised her family. They go to the local library at Houlton where the librarian shows them pictures of William’s father Wilhelm during his POW years. Lucy, who grew up in a tiny house in the middle of an Illinois soybean field, panics at the empty Maine landscape, which reminds her of the isolation of her unhappy and impoverished childhood. Even though she is a successful writer who has lived in New York most of her adult life, the return to a rural setting inspires the same feelings of invisibility and worthlessness that predominated during her years of deprivation. Lucy realizes that while her education and association with William’s family gave her middle-class privileges, her inability to stay in touch with her family of origin caused another form of isolation and depression. She recalls Catherine’s continual insistence that Lucy came from nothing, and that Catherine called her a piece of “trash” on her deathbed. Still, Lucy realizes that William has his own issues with his mother, who he felt rejected him. This has caused him to feel rejected by women, even as he has continually sought their comfort in his three marriages and extramarital affairs.

William is too timid to meet Lois, so he asks Lucy to go in advance. Lucy finds that Lois is both proud and resilient; however, her hurt over Catherine’s abandonment manifests in resentment and the cold treatment she gave Catherine when she sought Lois out. Lois, a close reader of Lucy’s books, was also hurt at being left out of Lucy’s memoir and at the fact that William did not know of her existence until going on an ancestry website. Lois refuses to meet William. Feeling the sting of Lois’s rejection, William disappears for a few weeks when they return to New York, distracting himself with an unsuitable woman. Meanwhile, Lucy confronts the loss of David and the terrifying childhood feelings the Maine trip brought up.

When William asks Lucy to accompany him on a trip to the Cayman Islands, she is bemused. She realizes that William does not have the aura of authority and protection that he once held for her….

1. “My second husband, David, died last year, and in my grief for him I have felt grief for William as well. Grief is such a—oh, it is such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think.”  Is this true?  Is grief solitary?

When people asked me how I was those first months after my husband died, I told them the truth—how sad I felt, how hard it was to breathe, how much I missed him. All too soon, however, I noticed the glazed looks in their eyes and realized they were just being polite, so I learned to say “I’m okay,” or “I’m coping,” and gradually my grief went underground.

People don’t want to hear about our grief. They need to believe that grief is easily fixed and that life goes on as before after the loss of a life mate. As a result, we grievers hide our emotions to spare their feelings and to keep from burdening them with the weight of our loss. And we hide our emotions to spare ourselves having to deal with their incomprehension, their efforts to fix us, and their unconscious attempts to control our grief with comments such as “It’s time to move on.”

Sometimes, we hide our emotions because we are too embarrassed to show them.

Occasionally we push people away who are willing to listen or offer support because we don’t want them to think we are self-indulgent or weak for grieving long beyond what is considered a reasonable time. And so we self-censure ourselves and hide our grief because more than anything, we need to show we are strong.

The truth is, there is something seriously wrong with a society that makes the bereaved feel self-indulgent for grieving. And there is something wrong with a culture that thinks silence is strength. And yet, telling the truth about how we are feeling or what we are going through to a sympathetic listener is an important step towards healing. It takes strength to show vulnerability, to go against that ingrained code of silence, to take our grief above ground.

If grief has taught me nothing else, it has taught me that we are all so much stronger than we ever imagined, perhaps even strong enough to tell the truth the next time someone asks how we are.(r.2)

2.“He took heart in the fact that he could pass many people—the old man with a walker, or a woman who used a cane, or even just a person his age who seemed to move more slowly than he did—and this made him feel healthy and alive and almost invulnerable in a world of constant traffic.” William is proud of his ability to pass for a younger man, but is there more to life?  Is there too much focus on the outside and not on the inside in our society?

It’s kind of self-absorbed，after William has a better communication with Lucy, he started to take his authority away. And admit his weakness. We need other’s help to see ourselves better.

 -Tuesday with Morrie

"The truth is once you learn how to die, you learn how to live"

"Accepet who you are and revel in it"

3.Despite being a well-known writer, Lucy describes feeling “invisible in the deepest way.” Discuss her feelings. Does she ever stop feeling this way? Who in her life makes her feel visible?

(1)William make her visible, she pointed out that William only married his mom and to Lucy, she only married her father. William got rejected by five women(three divorced women, one have affair. And his ex-sister. To Lucy, William saw Lucy as the great spirit, not like her brother and sister, put themselves in the past history, so murkey and dark. Lucy is always shining.

(2)Lucys second hub David makes her visible, Lucy can’t forget her love to David: Never in a thousand years would he have laughed at me. Never. For anything.

Lucy says she couldn’t really have a home without William, but William could have a home without her. What do you think she means by this?

William is mean, but never accept that until Lucy confronted his problem, after he admitted that he is more mean than Lucy, They have a better relationship with each other.

4.To deny her husband the chance of comforting her, Lucy says, “was an unspeakably awful thing.” Explain what she means by this.

If they didn’t open their heart to speak the truth, it’s very awful and make the wound uncured.

the opposite of love is cold not hatred

5.At the close of the book, Lucy says, “We do not know anybody, not even ourselves. Except a little tiny, tiny bit…” What do you make of this statement? Have you found it to be true in your life?

Everyone has a pandora box, we need help each other to open it and help each other to solve our problems

6.How did you feel about Lucy and William by the end of the book?

We learned something until it was late,but better than never.

7. What does this book tell us about marriage and love?  Do the people we loved in the past stay in our hearts forever or do we leave them behind as new loves create newer layers?

I believer everyone we encounter is invited by us, if we didn’t solve it, it will meet again.

8. Is it worse to have loved and lost or to have lost and never learned anything from the loss?

   silence is the sign of loneliness

Who felt loneliness, give in first, we will feel cozy after we give in.

9. Describing an online site called Ijustwanttotalk.com, Lucy notes: “People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.” Is this true?  Are we lonely?  Are we always looking for something to make us feel complete?

We are alone, but not lonely

From sharing, make us complete

We need to know how to help ourselves

Then we will know how to help others

Summery from Clive the consultant

Today we had a great discussion about the novel, Oh William! Lucy Barton is mourning the death of her beloved second husband. She finds some welcome distraction in revisiting her relationship with her first husband, William Gerhardt, the philandering father of her two grown daughters. William has never let the women in his life get too close, and is already on his third marriage, but as Shannon perfectly identified, he is the real loser in the story despite his belief that he is the hero. Against all odds Lucy and William have remained friendly but Lucy’s quiet observations made her a great character.

We talked a great deal about grief and Happy shared with us from Italy the loss of her mother-in-law from Covid. Lucy tells us that in her grief for David "I have felt grief for William as well. Grief is such a — oh, such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think. It is like sliding down the outside of a really long glass building while nobody sees you." Faye pointed out that grief doesn’t need to be solitary and this observation was right on the money.  Emma made wonderful observations about Lucy’s travel when Lucy and William’s loneliness and vulnerabilities coincide.  Lucy agrees to accompany William on a trip to Maine. His mother, Catherine Cole, was born there — though she never returned after leaving her first husband. (She met her second husband, Williams father, one of hundreds of German POWs from Hitlers army sent to do farmwork in Maine after the war, when he was working on her first husbands potato farm.) Florence and Lily pointed out the limitations of her up-bringing but that Lucy says she loved her late mother-in-law, who recognized the limitations of her upbringing and took her under her wing — even though Catherine told friends, "This is Lucy, Lucy comes from nothing." Its one of many memories that takes on a new cast in light of what William and Lucy learn about Catherine on their road trip.  It was another rewarding meeting where we were able to learn about grief, joy and what makes marriages work and what makes us succeed in life.  Thank you to everyone who joined today and a big thank you to Angela who came during her lunch break and offered us great insights into the characters.