Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout: A review

A new book by one of my favorite authors will definitely cause me to cast aside my planned reading list and jump right on it! So it was with Elizabeth Strout's latest, Tell Me Everything. I regret nothing.

Strout takes us back to Crosby, Maine, to check on some of the wonderful characters we have met in her other books. There's the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now in her nineties and living in a retirement community at the edge of town. There's Lucy Barton who now lives with her ex-husband, William, in a house by the sea. And there is Bob Burgess who has developed an abiding friendship with Lucy. The two of them go on walks where they talk about their fears and regrets and how they came to be who they are. 

The first lines of the book introduce Bob: "This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart but he does not know that about himself; like many of us he does not know himself as well as he assumes to and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do." 

Bob is the town lawyer and he has the unenviable task of defending a lonely man who is accused of murdering his mother. It was a crime that shocked the community of Crosby, a community that seems to have already made up its mind that the man is guilty. 

Meanwhile, Lucy has come to know Olive and she visits her each afternoon. The two of them tell each other stories about their lives and the "unrecorded lives" of people they have known. In the process, those people and their lives are given the respect and meaning that they deserve.

Elizabeth Strout writes about people who live ordinary lives, unremarkable in any way, and yet she shows us that those lives are indeed interesting. Each of us, no matter how ordinary, has a story to tell and has an impact for good or bad on the people and the world around us. 

Thus, Strout has written a character-driven novel for which the plot (such as one exists) is secondary. Her theme seems to be that it is important to notice the little things in life, because it is those little things that, in the end, create the big picture of our lives. And that, I think, is an important message for all of us to take to heart. Perhaps it takes a brilliant writer like Strout to make that clear to us.