The suffering and trauma in Elizabeth Strout's paired novels

After finishing reading Elizabeth Strout's 2016 novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, I've resumed reading her 2017 novel, which could as well be described as a collection of linked stories, Anything Is Possible, which focuses on the small Illinois town where a town native Lucy Barton, who has settled as an adult in NYC, has just published a memoir about her childhood in the town (an obvious back-reference to the previous Strout novel), and what a shock, to move from the attenuated, rather placid world of My Name Is .., in which the narrator, the eponymous Lucy Barton, recalls her lengthy recovery from surgery and her strained relationship w/ her mother, w/ a # of references to how she'd felt ostracized in the town in her youth, largely because of her family's extreme poverty, the shame about her father's antisocial behavior (there is one paragraph or short section in which Lucy reads a reference to a mentally ill man who masturbated in public and she feels great horror about this - only in the subsequent novel to we learn more about her father's sexual behavior), her concerns about her older brother (his odd behavior toward animals - sleeping in the pen w/ animals doomed for slaughter - and his effeminate behavior that outraged their father), and most of all her difficult relationship w/ her mother, at times friendly and like gal-pals and at other times distant and silent. (Sorry for that ridiculously long sentence.) In the latter novel, however, we get a series of stories that show that everyone in the town, whatever the tenuous or direct connection to Lucy Barton may be, is in some way wounded, cruel, degenerate, criminal, surreptitious, or all of the above; Lucy's family history, which Strout expands somewhat in the 1st chapter/story in Anything Is Possible (we meet her brother and get some insight into the father's rage and into his possible act of criminal arson) is part of a pattern of hatred and shame that permeates this small town. Yesterday I read the 4th story/chapter, which tells of a seemingly upright 60-something resident, Charlie, whose wife runs a little gift shop (we met her in the 1st story) who, under the guise of attending groups sessions and conferences w/ fellow Vietnam vets, is carrying on a long-term relationship w/ a prostitute; the woman - he never actually learns her real name - hits him up for $10k to pay off her son's drug dealer; Charlie gives her the $ and then feels great remorse, as he knows his wife will see the w/drawal from their account and he will have to explain why he has stolen this $ from her. As noted in an earlier post, these stories also into tales of infidelity, voyeurism, rape, and other malfeasances.Is Strout's point that this town is typical? That everyone suffers in secret (though only artists make that suffering public)?