Tell Me Everything (2024)

Why this one?

This is my final read on the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist.

Elizabeth Strout (1956- ; active 1982- ) was born in Portland, Maine, USA. She studied law, receiving her J.D. from Syracuse College of Law, as well as spending time at Oxford in the UK. Her first short story was published by New Letters magazine in 1982, and continued to have short stories published in literary magazines.  She worked briefly in law and subsequently in teaching while working on her debut novel. 

Amy and Isabelle was published in 1998 and was a critical and commercial success, nominated for the 2000 Orange/Women’s Prize (won by Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times) and the Pen/Faulkner Prize as well as being dramatized for a TV movie. Her third novel, Olive Kitteridge, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was followed by a sequel Olive, Again in 2019. The first book was adapted for TV by HBO in 2014, with Frances McDormand in the title role.

In 2016 she published My Name is Lucy Barton, the first of her novels to feature her other famous heroine. It was longlisted for the 2016 Booker, and was followed quickly by Anything is Possible (2017) which features interlinked short stories set around Barton’s hometown. Oh William! (published 2021) was a more fully-fledged return to Lucy’s own story, continued in 2022’s Lucy By the Sea, set during the pandemic. 

Thoughts, etc.

Tell Me Everything brings together characters from across Strout’s writing career. In rural Maine, Bob Burgess (from 2013’s The Burgess Boys) finds himself taking on the case of a reclusive man who is under suspicion of the murder of his mother; also living nearby is novelist Lucy Barton, living near the coast with her ex-husband William and now firm friends with Bob; and at Bob’s suggestion Lucy also begins to visit the now nonagenarian Olive Kitteridge in her nursing home, where the two share stories and ponder on life and love.

This is in many ways a kind of lap of honour for Strout, bringing together elements of everything her vast audience love about her writing. I approached it with a little hesitation as I had something of a fear that it would veer into the territory of fan fiction, and also that aspects of the story might be lost on readers who haven’t read every one of Strout’s previous books. I’m very much in that group of readers, having only sampled a couple of Lucy books and a single Olive, and not having previously encountered ‘the Burgess boys’. Broadly, I needn’t have worried. While there are definitely elements that I recognised as a form of fan service, it’s all done with warmth and subtly, and the central story at least is self-sufficient and worked well for me despite my total lack of previous knowledge of the protagonist.

Because this, to me, felt like Bob Burgess’ book, more than anything else. His backstory, and that of his brother Jim, are evidently crucial, but in the hands of a master storyteller like Strout you are never left with any major knowledge gaps. Strout’s writing always feels like oral storytelling, so the frequent repetition of key facts from previous works doesn’t feel jarring, just a natural rhythm akin to someone who cares for you recounting something important and ensuring you understand. As Jim deals with his wife’s death and his poor relationship with his children, and Bob confronts his feelings for a friend and finds a father-figure role of his own, a pivotal incident from their childhood looms large. In some senses the rest of the characters in the book - even those many readers know so well - seem to orbit around this central relationship, and that’s not always a bad thing.

Away from its familiar characters, the book benefits from having a compelling central plot, essentially a murder mystery involving the Beach family, in which the elderly mother has been murdered, with suspicion falling upon her children. While this plot is definitely also there in service of the central focus on Bob, it has its own momentum and interesting characters, and something meatier to hold onto amidst the usual concoction of unrelated but beautiful ‘unheralded life’ vignettes. The Beach family plot, I think, helps make this an accessible read regardless of your familiarity with the other characters.

Coming back to the usual suspects, their deployment here is varying in its effectiveness. Lucy plays a fairly important role, given her direct relationship with Bob, and she receives further character development in terms of her own family relationships and that with her returning ex-husband William. The book also perhaps gives a bit more time than I remember in my previous encounters with Lucy to exploring her flaws, which again adds interesting texture to her story (though I can’t discount that these were also covered more extensively in the other Lucy books I haven’t read!)

Olive, for me, felt a little less necessary to the story. I sort of get the reason for her being there: it would be very difficult to set a story in these communities without somehow finding a role for that lynchpin of the region. And of course it’s undeniably fun to revisit her blunt grumpiness and intolerance of stupidity once again. In her case, though, I’m more pleased that I had read at least some of her backstory, as I think a newcomer would get very little sense of the richness of her character in the brief encounters we have here. I felt that she might have worked better in the context in more of a cameo role, but then the book wouldn’t have been able to be sold on the ‘Lucy meets Olive’ promise.

These are minor criticisms though. Anyone fully immersed in Strout’s world will obviously find a lot to love here; and there’s more than enough here to keep a total newcomer engaged. As ever, there’s a poetic economy to the writing that feels born of short story excellence, even in a more integrated novel. Also true to form is the extensive character list, where even those characters that appear only momentarily feel fully realised and relatably human. Through all of it is a perfectly poised articulation of both the beauty and sadness of existence. All of the characters (bar perhaps Olive, who is of course just getting on with it all) are seeking purpose, and in this case often finding that however widely they’d been seeking, what they were looking for was usually right there in front of them.

Score

9

The most purely pleasurable read on this year’s hit-and-miss shortlist, and for me the most profound and meaningful despite its unassuming simplicity. I still sense that it would be a rather unusual choice of winner, given that it doesn’t fully stand alone, but we’ve seen sequels take home the Booker before, so why not the Women’s Prize? I wouldn’t hate it.

For the record, here’s how I scored the six books on the list. I’d be at least moderately happy with any of the top four as a winner, but can’t really make a call on what’s most to likely to actually take the prize home next week. Something about The Safekeep still feels very award-worthy to me, but I’m not predicting anything…

1. The Safekeep (9)
2. Tell Me Everything (9)
3. Good Girl (8.5)
4. All Fours (8.5)
5. The Persians (7.5)
6. Fundamentally (7)

Next up

TBD!