linked stories and two linked novels by Elizabeth Strout

Took a step backward in time yesterday as I paused in reading Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible (2017) to begin reading her previous novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016). Anything is a collection of linked stories about various people in the small Illinois town all of whom have some connection to or remembrance of Lucy, who grew up ostracizeD nad impoverished in a troubled family, virtually if not entirely friendless, and who has become an author living in NYC and who has just published a memoir. That memoir is obviously the eponymous 2016 novel, which purports to answer the question as to how this young woman could have risen above her deprived background and become a serious writer. What we read in Anything (first three stories/chapters anyway) shows us that the people who touched her life (including her parents and sibs) and scorned or shunned her during her childhood had significant problems of their own - mental, moral, ethical problems including in particular infidelity that broke apart families and scarred the children of the broken marriages. Stepping back to read Lucy, Strout introduces us to the successful author and devoted mother and it takes sometime before we comprehend the deprivation of her family and community background. We meet her as she is recovering form sepsis in a hospital and her mother visits - I was surprised that she's kind tho shy and somewhat distant tho not as monstrous a sister I'd expected from what I'd read in Anything. Sprout gives us a glimpse into Lucy's odd family tho when Lucy recalls her first visit home w her new husband and the coldness w which her father treats him, allegedly because he's German and her father feels guilt about killing two young Germans in WWII - I don't buy that entirely. Her mother also begins telling L about the fate of the Nicely sisters - a family broken up by scandal surrounding mother's affair - and we get much more about that in the subsequent volume. I don't know of any two literary works linked in quit the same way - one as a source document referenced in the 2nd - as these two, linked stories and linked novels embracing each other.