Amy & Isabelle

Over the weekend (train ride), I read Amy & Isabelle, by Elizabeth Strout, who wrote Olive Kitteridge. I loved Olive Kitteridge, book and mini-series (with Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins), for how it helps you get to know difficult people, and get over your own tendencies to judge and dislike people, even if they don't! Ha! I have also read The Burgess Boys and Abide With Me, so now I yearn to read My Name is Lucy Barton, but I will have to wait till it becomes available at the library! Amy & Isabelle is a lovely, realistic mother-daughter story. I just learned, tonight, that there's a tv movie of this, but surely there's nothing Hallmark about it, is there?! (Though I'm a sucker for Hallmark.) What I admire about this book, and her others, is how people change, over time, how people learn to face or tell the truth. In life, perhaps, some people never learn this. In art, we learn how much courage it takes. How gradual or how sudden it can be. How human. As always, art teaches me how to be human.