A Review of Tell Me Everything By Elizabeth Strout
Mohan Gulrajani
Unrecorded Lives: A Review of Tell Me Everything By Elizabeth Strout
by Mattis Gravingen
Tell Me Everything is a touching small-town drama reflecting on human connections.
Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything opens with Olive Kitteridge sharing a story with her friend Lucy Barton about her mother, who was forced to marry someone other than the man she loved. After Olive’s mother dies, she discovers that her mother continued to love the other man throughout her life without telling anyone.
Lucy starts crying when she hears this story, and I wanted to cry as well. It’s a simple story about an ordinary person. Still, there is something touching about it, this young woman who never expressed her feelings but carried them into her grave, which is characteristic of Strout’s style. She writes about normal people with difficult feelings we all have but never talk about.
Strout’s previous novels about the characters Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton similarly touched readers, reached the New York Times Best Seller List, and won a Pulitzer prize. In her new book Tell Me Everything, she brings together her beloved cast in a small-town drama, once again set in Crosby, Maine. This time, she follows the attorney Bob Burgess as he defends a local man accused of killing his mother.
She writes about normal people with difficult feelings we all have but never talk about.
While this is the story’s surface-level conflict, the murder case interweaves with stories about friends, past lovers, and relatives who struggle to make connections: Bob’s ex-wife finds her husband cheating on her and becomes an alcoholic. His brother mourns the loss of his wife while struggling to make his son like him. Bob himself loses his love for his wife while reluctantly falling in love with Lucy, who is happily in a relationship. All of them feel lonely. But why?
The novel seems to answer that their loneliness is interlinked with a withering United States that makes people struggle to connect. The characters feel a “terror”, not just about their decay as they grow older and more lonely, but also because their country is falling apart. After the pandemic, mental health and drug abuse have increased, the economy has become unstable, and they worry about a possible civil war or global war. Bob describes the country’s state as a “tractor trailer rumbling down the highway and the wheels, one by one, falling off.” The national trauma he describes mirrors his own childhood trauma of accidentally driving a car over his father. In such ways, the novel juxtaposes the personal and the global decline. It gives the story a hopeless and anxious ambience similar to when I think of today’s overwhelming crises.
The novel seems to answer that their loneliness is interlinked with a withering United States that makes people struggle to connect.
But perhaps a better answer to why the characters are lonely is that none of them listen to others. It’s not like they don’t have friends; Bob’s ex-wife has lots of them, but she can’t tell them about her alcohol troubles, because all they want to talk about is TV shows and their kids. Bob tries to tell his wife and ex-wife about a childhood trauma, but they don’t care. His wife also won’t listen to how he struggles with the murder case but keeps talking about her sermons. The novel implies the character’s struggle to relate because deep down, we will never “really know another person”:
“We match up for a moment–or maybe a lifetime– with somebody because we feel that we are connected to them. And we are. But we’re not in a certain way, because nobody can go into the crevices of another’s mind, even the person can’t go into the crevices of their own mind, and we live–all of us–as though we can […] none of us are on sturdy soil, we just tell ourselves we are. And we have to.”
Bob is the exception to the claim that we cannot relate with one another because he consumes the troubles of others.
Bob is the exception to the claim that we cannot relate with one another because he consumes the troubles of others. He takes on a murder case because he feels sympathy with the accused, helps his brother out when he loses contact with his son, and listens for hours to his ex-wife’s alcohol issues. He eats other people’s sins, as Lucy Barton comments, but this emotionally disturbs him because he doesn’t receive the same attention back. The novel seems to argue that we don’t have space for other people and are thus bound to be lonely.
However, Bob has found a way out of this loneliness through his friendship with Lucy. On their weekly walks, it’s as if they can talk without talking. They can communicate to others with their gaze that “You’re right here, and that is all that matters.” Lucy similarly mentions how she sat on a train once beside a stranger. Without exchanging a word, she felt as if they were conversing about the view from the window, and suddenly felt like she loved the stranger. If only for a moment, these small interactions make Bob and Lucy feel connected in their shared loneliness. As Lucy says, the novel tells “stories of loneliness and love […] and the small connections we make in this world if we are lucky.”
Still, underneath this seemingly uneventful tale, emotionally broken characters engross me.
There isn’t a clear conflict in this novel, as the murder mystery is always in the background. Instead, the book circulates Bob and Lucy’s walking along the coast, Olive and Lucy telling one another stories, family affairs, and work on the case. Still, underneath this seemingly uneventful tale, emotionally broken characters engross me. Strout seamlessly switches between the small-towners and their struggles with alcoholism, unfound love, aging and death. Her dense interiority shows once again that beyond the surface, the most ordinary characters hide difficult emotions as they long for a close connection. That makes me care for all of them despite their uneventful lives.
Throughout the story, Olive and Lucy meet to tell stories of “unrecorded lives,” dead people like Olive’s mother who are forgotten by everyone but still went through tragedies of abuse, unfound love, and adultery–stories that made me want to cry. Strout shows that the lives in Crosby are like Olive and Lucy’s unrecorded lives: ordinary people who hide loneliness, grief, trauma, and love. Strout writes that we all have a life worthy of documenting because we all hide a lack of connection. By bringing together these broken small-town characters, her new novel shows this more clearly than ever.
ELIZABETH STROUT is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lucy by the Sea; Oh William!, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in Lond
https://berkeleyfictionreview.org/2024/12/12/unrecorded-lives-a-review-of-tell-me-everything-by-elizabeth-strout/on. She lives in Maine.
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
601 - B, Hamilton Court, DLF City Phase - IV,
Gurugram, 122009, Haryana
Mo. +919818253979