Elizabeth Strout: ‘I don’t know many people who didn’t have something disturbing happen in their childhood’

At Borris Festival of Writing and Ideas this summer there was a notable reaction from the crowd – somewhere between a cheer and a wow – when the American author Elizabeth Strout announced that her forthcoming novel Tell Me Everything features two of her most loved characters, Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, meeting for the first time.
Most if not all of the audience knew who Strout was talking about; she has the kind of loyal, grassroots readers who eagerly await each of her books, knowing they’ll be rewarded with an intricate network of characters with messy histories and overlapping relationships in small, fictionalised towns in the state of Maine.
If characters like Olive, Lucy and Bob Burgess, who makes a welcome return in the new book, feel real to readers, it is clear that Strout lives with these characters too. Comments such as “Isn’t he just lovely?”, or conversely, “Isn’t she awful!” about her various characters pepper her conversation throughout our phone call, often leading to laughter that feels spontaneous and genuine, as if she herself is surprised by what her characters get up to.
For the interview, Strout is at her kitchen table on the second floor of the house she shares in Brunswick, Maine, with her second husband, the state’s former attorney general James Tierney, whom she met at one of her readings. During the pandemic the couple moved back to Maine, where Strout grew up, but she has retained an apartment in New York and likes going between the two.
The pandemic was a productive time for the writer, with three novels published in recent years – Oh! William in 2021, Lucy by the Sea in 2022 and now Tell Me Everything. Did it feel like she was being prolific? “No, I had no sense of that,” she says. “I was just writing. I was trying to focus on getting the pandemic down as it happened. I’d never written a book so close to anything happening in history. I wanted to get it down through Lucy’s eyes.”
Tell Me Everything, her 10th novel, marks a return to a more fictionalised landscape, away from world events. Pandemic ripples are still felt in the lives of the characters but the focus is on their interaction with each other in a hopeful, perceptive story about the power of love and friendship to sustain through difficult times.
Strout’s continual return to certain characters feels original in the contemporary fiction landscape, recalling 20th-century American writers such as Updike or Roth. “I never intend to go back,” she says. “But I suddenly realised that Olive and Lucy are actually living in the same town. It just sort of occurred to me one day and I couldn’t turn down that opportunity. And Bob was there too.”
In a departure from her usual style, the narrative voice of Tell Me Everything is omniscient, which also harks to an earlier literary age. Why the change? “Because there is so much in [the book]. I felt I had to really stand back and yet be inclusive with the reader. My friend Kathy Chamberlain thought the narrative voice was too small when I sent her some pages. That’s when I realised that if I’m going to write about all these people, I’m going to have to really open it up.”
Strout met Chamberlain on a writing course at the New School in New York more than 40 years ago, and she has remained her first and only reader. She feels lucky to have had such support, particularly in the long years after law school when she was writing without getting published. Her break came in 1998, aged 43, with her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, a beautifully observed and gripping account of a troubled mother-daughter relationship. The book was acclaimed but didn’t reach a wide audience.
[ Elizabeth Strout: ‘You will continue to get better if you keep writing. That’s what I did’Opens in new window ]
Eight years later her second novel, Abide with Me, also earned strong reviews, but it was her third, Olive Kitteridge, in 2008, that brought critical and commercial success. Since then her work has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize. She credits her success as a writer in part to the years she spent working as a legal secretary and waitressing.
“I think that going through the law-school process really helped me strip down my work. I didn’t realise it at the time – but when I look back at it. In law you just have to state the facts of the case, and that was always the most interesting part for me because that was the story.
“Being a waitress in nearly every single restaurant on the north coast – I was there for so long – was very helpful because you get to meet and observe so many kinds of people. And you’re a little bit invisible to them because you’re just handing them their food, so there’s plenty of time to observe a wide variety of people, some of whom have stayed in my mind.”
These days she writes in a studio in Maine but she has always been able to write anywhere, no matter how busy or noisy the location. “I think that’s because when I was raising my daughter, and I didn’t have much time, running around on subways or whatever, I learned to be able to do that immediately. It’s so helpful. If an idea comes to me, then I get it down.”
Typically she writes for two hours at a time, then takes a break, often going for a walk with friends. “I just like to talk,” she says, laughing. “To talk with my friends. That’s my idea of recreation, frankly.” Sometimes these conversations inform part of her writing, as with the character of Margaret in Tell Me Everything, a preacher whose narcissistic tendencies are beginning to weigh on her husband, Bob, while he draws closer to his good friend Lucy Barton.
The stories we tell each other, and more essentially those we tell ourselves, are at the centre of Strout’s writing. Her new book is no different in this regard, packed with smaller stories within the larger arc of the main characters. For these cameos, Strout sometimes uses older ideas that never made it out of draft form.
“The Janice story, the hairdresser, was a story I had written that had never really worked,” she says. “Yet it was still with me somehow, so let’s try again under these circumstances. And then Lucy’s stories that she tells Olive, I personally got such a kick out of them because they’re not really good stories. Olive is like, What’s the point to this story, I don’t understand it. She’s thinking that Lucy’s supposed to be a good writer and wondering why she can’t tell a story. I find that so funny.”
There is the sense throughout the interview that Strout is a born storyteller; her conversation style is expansive, engaging and frequently funny. She loves it when people find the humour in her books. “I remember my mother saying when she read my books, ‘I just howled my way through this,’ and it would just make me so happy because it meant she got it. But when I’m writing, I’m not trying to be funny. I just try and get my perception down.”
She learned to write “a million years ago”, on a course with Gordon Lish. “He talked about writing against the grain, and I’ve always tried to do that. It’s very important because that’s where you get your friction for your fiction. Otherwise it just glides along. In my mind it becomes a little globular. But if you write against the grain, it’s like you’re scraping against something and then things can happen.”
There is plenty that goes against the grain in Tell Me Everything, not least the backstories of hardship that characters reveal to each other. Issues of damage and legacy loom large in Strout’s fiction; the past, often suppressed by her characters, is not usually a happy place. “My daughter mentioned to me the other day about happy childhoods, and I thought: wait a minute, who has them?” she says, laughing.
“I don’t really know that many people who didn’t have something happen in their childhood that was disturbing. So there’s that, and then in terms of writing fiction, it’s helpful to have people with something in their past. To have these sadnesses they are trying to grow from. Eugene O’Neill wrote a play called Ah, Wilderness! about a happy family, and it was just such a boring play. And I always remember that. I was about 19 and I realised that we don’t really need to hear about happy families.”
In Tell Me Everything, characters such as Bob and Lucy are referred to as “sin-eaters,” people who can bear to listen to the pain and sorrow of others. Though Strout is not religious herself, her upbringing in a devoutly Congregationalist household likely informed this term. “For some reason as a child somebody introduced me to the concept of a sin-eater, just one day, very briefly, they said this man walks through the woods and he gets more and more slumped over because he eats everybody’s sins.”
Bob and Lucy are in the minority in their abilities, which Strout thinks is one of the saddest things she has observed about the wider world. “The naked distress of somebody is frightening to another person,” she says in the casually profound way that is so reminiscent of her writing style. “And that’s so sad because it’s the time when the distressed person needs tremendous care, even briefly; just a hug.”
Tell Me Everything is published by Viking