Tell Me Everything
Tell Me Everything
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Elizabeth Strout on Tell Me Everything
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A walk, a quarry, and characters who refused to leaveThe book began not at a desk but mid-stride. Strout had already written Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton as separate people in separate novels, but the pandemic had brought her back to Maine permanently, and one day she noticed what the geography of her fictional town of Crosby, the small coastal Maine community where her characters had been quietly settling, had made possible.
Walking around one day it came to me that Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton were living in the same town now. So I thought: Let’s get them together and see what happens.
Bob Burgess, the divorced lawyer who had appeared in earlier novels, followed Olive and Lucy into the book not because the plot required him but because Strout felt she had left something unfinished with him. She described his particular quality in the PBS Books conversation: a man whose decency is invisible to himself, which made him impossible to look away from.
I’ve never had any interest in writing any sort of mystery thing at all. It just came to me, the way these things come to me. I just kept thinking of a quarry, and then I sort of thought about a red wig. It just wouldn’t go away. [paraphrased from audio]
The murder subplot involving a quarry and a red wig arrived the same way the characters did: uninvited and insistent. Strout eventually folded the case into the book as one more burden Bob quietly absorbs, not as the novel’s structural spine.
How she wrote it
The narrator who made the book possibleStrout wrote the opening conversation between Olive and Lucy first, and it worked well enough to show her the book’s architecture. From that one live scene, she saw how the two women could meet periodically throughout the novel to trade what she came to call ‘unrecorded lives,’ stories about ordinary people no one else is paying attention to. But the structure alone wasn’t enough to get the book moving. What she needed was a voice.
It was not until I found the right narrator that I was able to really get the book going. It is a different kind of narrator from any I have used before. I needed the narrator to be large and yet very inclusive of the reader, so that the narrator is essentially saying to the reader, Come with me this way, and then that way. Once I found that voice I could write the book.
Her method for building individual scenes has stayed consistent across her career, shaped by years when she had only two hours every other day to write while raising her daughter and teaching. She has never needed to know where a book is going before she sits down. What she needs instead is something true to bring to the page.
I use whatever is most pressing in me and transpose that emotion into a character, not the factual circumstance, but the emotion of it. That way I can get a scene with what I call a ‘heartbeat’ to it. If a scene does not have a heartbeat, it gets tossed onto the floor.
The white space between scenes is not a stylistic tic but a structural decision about where the reader’s work begins. Strout is deliberate about when she stops writing, and the CBS Mornings conversation with Oprah’s Book Club is one of the few places she has explained exactly what she expects to happen in the gap she leaves.
When I’m done writing what I think is needed, I will stop and I will allow at that point the reader to enter. The reader during that white space will be able to enter the book with his or her or their own story and therefore make it more their own. [paraphrased from audio]
One relationship in the book grew in a direction she hadn’t anticipated and alarmed her when she saw where it was heading. Rather than redirect it, she held to the principle that has governed her fiction across every novel: stay true to what the characters actually are, not what it would be tidier for them to be.
When I write — when I go to the page — I suspend judgment on my characters. And in real life, I’m sure I’m probably as judgmental as most people in real life. But when I go to the page, I am so free of judgment of my characters, and that’s so fun. It’s so liberating because I don’t care how badly behaved they are — as long as they’re truthfully bad behaved, I don’t care.
The personal thread
Unrecorded lives, and why they matterThe phrase ‘unrecorded lives,’ which Olive and Lucy use to describe the stories they trade about people no one is writing books about, surfaced in the first scene Strout drafted. She heard it come out of Lucy’s mouth and recognized it immediately as the book’s moral center. Her investment in those lives is not abstract: she grew up in rural Maine among people who never expected to appear in literature.
This book is about ordinary people and the unrecorded lives they lead — which would be most of us.
The question of self-knowledge has run through Strout’s fiction for decades, but in this novel it becomes structural: every major character is understood differently by the people around them, and none of them fully understands themselves. She framed the problem during a First Draft podcast conversation, not as a theme she imposed on the book, but as the question the characters kept asking her.
How well do we really know ourselves because we’re in relation to all these different folks, and they mirror back something slightly different to us each one. So how do we really know who we are and how we appear to others? And just as importantly, how do we ever really, really know another person?
Bob is the character in whom this question lands hardest. He is a man of genuine kindness who has no idea he possesses it, perceived differently by his ex-wives, by Lucy, by Matt Beach, and by Olive, and he can’t reconcile any of those versions into a clear picture of himself.
What she wants us to sit with
To be truly listened to is to be seenThe title carries more weight than it first appears to. Strout unpacked it in the Women’s Prize conversation by separating the two halves of what the phrase implies: saying and receiving. The book’s title belongs equally to Bob, who listens to everyone, and to Matt Beach, the murder suspect who has never had anyone listen to him at all.
The title Tell Me Everything refers to not only telling, but listening, because if we are truly listened to, we are seen. In the end the book is about moments of grace that are visited upon us if we are lucky, meaning the ability to receive love and the ability to give it — no matter how imperfectly.
The novel finds love between a retired lawyer and a writer, between a ninety-year-old woman and a stranger she initially dismisses, and between an attorney and a murder suspect who has never had anyone in his corner. Strout does not rank these or sort them by propriety. In the PBS Books conversation, she offered the simplest possible account of why she gave the book so many of them.
Love is just so important, you know, whatever form it comes in. It touches us, makes us feel stronger, makes us feel better and then we can hopefully love somebody else. [paraphrased from audio]