Elizabeth Strout’s Long Homecoming

Just outside the town of Brunswick, Maine, the Harpswell Road runs along a finger of land poking into the ocean. It passes clapboard houses and mobile homes, stands of red-tipped sumac and pine, a few farms, a white Congregational church, and the Harpswell Historical Society, which used to be Bailey’s country store, when the writer Elizabeth Strout worked there as a teen-ager. “I remember sitting on the front porch eating a lollipop,” Strout, who is sixty-one, said one damp day in March, as she drove past. “And this woman came by, and she goes, ‘Oh, you’re so cute! Can I take a picture?’ My mother was furious. I think my mother felt like the person was . . . a summer person.”