In the Face of Stillness

A Child's Bids for Connection in Lucy Barton

The infant goes quiet mid-coo. Her mother’s face has suddenly gone still. The baby’s brow furrows. She smiles—tentative, then wider. Nothing. A small sound escapes her, rising. Her mother’s eyes don't change. The baby lifts both arms, fingers spread, straining forward. Her mother doesn’t reach back. She crumples. First comes a thin cry, then deeper, until her whole body heaves with it: Come back. Come back. Come back.

The plea reverberated through a research laboratory in 1975, marking the watershed moment when science discovered that even infants actively fight for connection. In developmental psychologist Ed Tronick’s famous “Still-Face” experiment¹, mothers were instructed to play warmly with their babies, then suddenly go still and offer a blank, unresponsive face. What followed was remarkable. The infants, flung suddenly out of connection, became scientists: testing, reaching, pleading.

These early reaches are the first drafts of a lifelong script. Relationship researcher Dr. John Gottman would later call them “bids for connection”—micro-moments of emotional outreach that ask, in one way or another, to be seen. As we grow, the reaching takes different shapes. A child might hold up a drawing and ask, “Is it good?” or call out, “Watch this!” before leaping from a step. In adult relationships, a partner might reach for a hand during a long car ride or point out a hummingbird at the feeder. These aren’t grand declarations. They are the quietest forms of asking. Yet they are all echoes of that original question posed by the infants in Tronick’s study: Are you there? Do you see me?

This query lives at the center of Elizabeth Strout’s luminous novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. In her thirties, Lucy finds herself confined to a hospital bed after a routine surgery leads to complications. She’s alone, isolated from her husband and daughters, when she wakes one afternoon to find her estranged mother, a vestige from the impoverished childhood Lucy had left behind. “I turned my eyes from the window late one afternoon and found my mother sitting on a chair at the foot of my bed... I had not seen [her] for years, and I kept staring at her.”

The visit becomes a kind of emotional excavation, two women circling what cannot be said. And as they do, a lifetime of missed bids for connection begins to stir beneath Lucy’s skin.

To understand what Lucy yearns for, we must return to how connection begins. In the original Still-Face experiment, everything started with attunement. The infant and mother engaged in warm, responsive play—faces animated, eyes locked, vocal rhythms dancing in synchrony. Decades later, researchers Behrendt and colleagues² recreated this dance while using modern brain imaging technology to peer inside the infant's mind as connection bloomed and ruptured. What they found centered on the middle-frontal gyrus, a region of the prefrontal cortex responsible for emotional regulation and attentional control. During attuned interaction, blood flow in this area remained low and steady. When the parent was reliably responsive, the child didn't have to scan, strategize, or protest. She could rest.

In My Name Is Lucy Barton, these moments of attunement are rare. When they happen, even in adulthood, Lucy notices. Like the infants in Tronick’s lab, the mere presence of Lucy’s mother is immediate and somatic: “Her being there…made me feel warm and liquid-filled…as if all my tension had been a solid thing and now was not.”

But then, in Tronick’s lab, the mother’s face went still. Her gaze flattened. Her voice disappeared. The infant, fluid and joyful mere seconds ago, froze. This moment of rupture was sharp and destabilizing. Even without words, the baby registered absence.

The shift is not only behavioral but neural. In the Behrendt study, the moment of maternal withdrawal brought a measurable surge of blood flow to the infant’s middle-frontal gyrus. This region, quiet during connection, suddenly flickered into high activity, like emergency lights clicking on. The brain mobilized from calm to alarm, activating systems designed to manage uncertainty and threat. The still-developing prefrontal cortex scrambled to stabilize the distress, monitoring for cues, redirecting attention, preparing new strategies. The infant smiled, giggled, coughed, called out—trying everything in her limited repertoire to bring her mother back.

Lucy knows this state intimately. At one point in the hospital, she tries to re-engage her mother after she goes quiet: “I picked the magazine back up and rustled through it. I said, ‘Hey, look—this woman has a pretty gown. Mom, look at this pretty gown.’” It’s the grown-up version of the same strategy, the emotional equivalent of the infant cooing for her still-faced mother.

She is met with silence. “But she did not respond or open her eyes.” And, like the infants, Lucy crumples: “I felt myself dropping into something familiar and dark from long ago.” The vocabulary is different, but the neurobiological choreography is the same: hypervigilance, hurt, and a desperate need to restore the bond.

That familiar darkness had a specific shape for Lucy. “I don’t know, in numbers, how many times I was locked in the truck,” she recalls. “But I was very young, probably no more than five years old... I remember pounding on the glass of the windows, screaming. I did not think I would die... it was just terror, realizing that no one was to come, and watching the sky get darker, and feeling the cold start in. Always I screamed and screamed. I cried until I could hardly breathe.”

Here is the Still-Face experiment without end. Not seconds of maternal blankness, but hours of absolute abandonment. The same neural systems that surged to life in Tronick’s infants would have fired relentlessly in that truck, the middle-frontal gyrus blazing with sustained alarm. But where the laboratory infant experienced rupture and repair within minutes, Lucy's body learned a different lesson: that crying might go on until you can hardly breathe, that darkness will come, that no one will respond.

But the brain remains capable of surprise.

Eventually, in Tronick’s lab, the mother re-engaged. Her eyes brightened, her voice returned, her face softened into a smile. The infant, who had spent long seconds in rising distress, recognized this shift with her whole body. In this moment of reunion, the Behrendt brain images revealed that blood flow to the middle-frontal gyrus began to ebb. The neural alarm that had been blazing with distress quieted. Connection had been restored.

Lucy experiences something similar in the hospital, when her mother offers a small, unspoken gesture: “I felt her squeeze my foot through the sheet.” It’s barely anything. But to Lucy, it means everything. Something long-suppressed breaks open: “‘Mommy,’ I said, bolting upright. ‘Mommy, please don’t go!’” Even after years of absence, even after the truck and the silence and all the unanswered reaching, a single moment of attunement can crack through the accumulated armor. This is the power of repair.

But then, her mother does go. And the old wound reopens. The vulnerable part of Lucy, briefly awakened by that squeeze, is left reaching once more: “I was terribly sad. I was as sad, really, as a sad child, and children can be very sad.”

This is the truth encoded in our earliest moments. The longing to be seen is not a learned behavior, but a biological imperative. Before we have words, we ask. With our eyes, our hands, our cries—we ask. And every response or absence carves itself into the shape of our becoming.

Lucy Barton’s story reminds us that this asking never truly ends. Even in adulthood, even after years of silence or pain, we are still tracing the outline of that first question: Are you there? Do you see me? This novel itself becomes a final bid, a grown child writing her way back toward her mother’s gaze.

As Lucy says, “I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”

1. The "still-face experiment" was first conducted in 1975 by developmental psychologist Dr. Edward Tronick and his colleagues, and formally published in 1978. In this study, infants aged 1 to 4 months engaged in face-to-face interactions with their mothers, who were instructed to suddenly stop responding emotionally—remaining still-faced and expressionless for three minutes after a period of normal play. The infants' responses were striking: they initially attempted to re-engage their mothers with smiles, vocalizations, and gestures, but when these bids failed, they became visibly distressed, turning away, arching their bodies, and eventually withdrawing altogether. This pattern highlighted how early infants expect—and need—reciprocal social interaction. The findings offered some of the earliest empirical evidence that even very young infants are active participants in social exchanges, capable of regulating their own affect and interpreting the emotional availability of caregivers. See: Edward Tronick et al., "The Infant's Response to Entrapment Between Contradictory Messages in Face-to-Face Interaction," Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 17, no. 1 (1978): 1–13.

2. A neuroimaging study by Behrendt and colleagues, published in 2020, used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore infant brain responses during live mother-infant interaction. In this study, 7- to 9-month-old infants participated in a modified still-face paradigm while researchers measured their brain activity. The study found that infants showed deactivation in the middle frontal gyrus—a brain region associated with emotional regulation—during happy-face (reunion) interactions with their mothers compared to interactions with a female stranger. This suggests that infants' brains process maternal interaction differently than stranger interaction, possibly reflecting the emotional co-regulation that occurs within the mother-infant relationship. This pioneering study demonstrated that fNIRS can capture neural responses during real-life dyadic interaction. See: Hannah F. Behrendt et al., "Infant brain responses to live face-to-face interaction with their mothers: Combining functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) with a modified still-face paradigm," Infant Behavior and Development 58 (2020): 101410.