Compassion inthe work of Elizabeth Strout

Hat tip to long-time fan of Elizabeth Strout, M, who has noted as a key element in her fiction the compassion she feels and evokes for her characters, even, in fact especially, for those not ordinarily deemed "likable" or at least sympathetic.  Not to open the whole debate about the need for literary protagonists to be likable, but there's a huge difference between a character who is dislakble because of his or her actions,ideas, and behavior whom the author treats w contempt and same type of character whom the author embraces or redeems (think for ex of Olive Kitteridge). Strout brings this quality of compassion to the fore in her novel My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), in which the narrator,the eponymous Lucy, who shares some biographical details w the author - and in fact is a first-person account of how the author, be it Lucy of Strout or Strout, became a writer. Lucy tells us of her chance meeting w an author whom she admires and of her subsequent conversation w a friend (a scholar or critic I think) who dismisses the author as too compassionate - a real put-down w of course some element of condescension and misogyny. Lucy/Strout , undeterred, determines that this authr's work will guide her as she sets out to become a writer, that is to write stories and subsequently a book (a memoir Lucy's case) of mistreatment, abuse, and suffering redeemed by compassion.  Writing about Lucy and her influences, Strout gives us real insight into her work and her intentions as a writer - though I think she makes it sound too easy to "become a writer," as if all one needs to do so is inspiration and a model. At least through the first half of the novel we don't get a sense of the difficulty of writing and publishing.