Darkness and compassion in Strout's novels

Elizabeth Strout's 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, tells a story in more or less alternating chapters of a successful writer from the Midwest who hadn't a troubled and impoverished childhood  - some of the chapters recollecting her long stay in a hospital for treatment of sepsismpost surgery Andy the other chapters looking back on her early days as a writer and her remarkable commercial and artistic success. Through these narratives coincide w some known facts about Strout's life we should not be naive enough readers to see this narrative as a memoir - at least not until we read Strout's follow up novel, Anything Is Possible, which gives us the back story or fills in the blanks about many characters mentioned in Lucy Barton and also notes the LB has published a memoir - so in a sense LB is a memoir by a fictional character (who's much like the author). Whew. The highlight emotionally of LB is Lucy's relationship w her mother, who visits her in the hospital. At times they seem like pals and confidants but then her mother can suddenly be cold and cutting - and we can sense from this the difficulty Lucynfaced growing up in such a troubled family - much more on that to come in the follow-up; in fact the oscillations of the mother's behavior are hard to credit in LB - until we read Anything.  It's almost as if Strout recognized , nearing the end of LB, that she had more to say than she could encompass on one novel and she rushes through many key points in the final sections of the novel, some of which are only a paragraph in length. We therefore learn little about the breakup of Strout's first marriage, and highly emotional scenes w her father and daughters feel perfunctory.  As noted in earlier post there is much about Strout's writing that is highly compassionate, and her character Lucy is a highly compassionate writer and thinker as well (tho why did Strout have to make her a Yankees' fan?). I think advice she received from her writing mentor was and is way off base, telling her she has only one story to tell tho she may do so in various ways - that seems to me to be judgmental and condescending: a great writer early in her career should feel she has thousands of stories to tell w world enough and time. The mentor seems to be speaking for herself,tired and under-appreciated in late career - tho she did give Lucy (and Strout?) the encouragement she needed at a difficult time. If this novel is about compassion adumbrated w darkness, the one to follow makes darkness visible.