65 pages • 2 hours read
Elizabeth StroutTell Me Everything
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Perspective in Storytelling
Who is telling a story plays a large part in how a story is shaped, and people understand its meaning. Throughout Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout explores the issue of how the storyteller shapes the story by considering perspective in several different ways. She immediately establishes perspective as a concern of the novel by creating an omniscient narrator who speaks to the reader in a technique called “direct address.” By doing so, Strout draws attention to the storyteller, whose identity remains unknown but has insight into the characters’ histories and their futures.
Strout also highlights the importance of the storyteller in Lucy and Olive’s meetings. They use the stories they tell as a framework to explore larger, more existential questions like what a person’s life means. As they do, they also take pleasure in the storytelling itself; when Olive says, “But that’s not part of the story,” Lucy replies, “We don’t know if that’s part of the story or not” (16). Lucy is a writer and has thought about the importance of perspective. Her point of view and questions often force Olive to confront the way her storytelling has shaped her family’s history and mythology. She asks questions like, “How do you know your mother didn’t care? Did your father tell you that?” (20), forcing Olive to assess her impact as the storyteller: “In my memory, Mother told me, and she said it—oh, not exactly disrespectfully—but as though she didn’t care. […] That’s how I always understood it” (20). With these exchanges, Strout draws attention to how the storyteller shapes the story by deciding what is and is not a part of it. Olive and Lucy’s stories are drawn out and full of digressions as they search for the heart of the story and consider how people’s stories have no real beginning and no end—that, too, is something the storyteller determines.
Strout also shows the power of perspective through the evolving histories of the Beach family. Bob and Susan remember Gloria Beach due to her nickname, “Bitch Ball,” and for being the mean cafeteria worker. Matt remembers her relationship with Diana as contentious and resentful but also admits that she was kind and loving to him. The perspective from which the storyteller tells Gloria’s story includes what the storyteller knows and what they decide is part of the story. When Bob gets a better picture of Gloria’s history, he understands that her self-loathing leads to her abusiveness. Understanding this allows Bob to have compassion for her. In Lucy and Olive’s sessions, they determine that their purpose is to tell the stories of “unrecorded lives.” This recognizes the importance of telling the story—without it, that history is lost. Without Gloria’s journals, her history and her emotional life would go unrecorded, and the way they contribute to a changed understanding of her character would be lost. Through the experiences of her characters, both in the past and present, Strout explores how perspective impacts the story.
The Impact of the Past on the Present
In Tell Me Everything, Strout explores the effects of the past on the present in a variety of ways. She considers ancestry and culture, upbringing and personal history, and the impact of history that isn’t known.
Throughout the novel, various characters review and relive the events of their lives, and their perspectives continue to shift as they grow older. Bob and Jim’s father’s death has fundamentally shaped their lives and relationship, and yet they have completely different memories of the event. Even something as basic as the weather is different in their versions of the event, with Jim remembering rain and Bob remembering sun. At the end of the novel, Bob realizes that “no one will ever know what happened” (272). Even though they will never discover the truth, this undefined event has shaped them and deeply impacted their lives and relationships.
Another way in which the characters consider the impact of the past on the present is through the motif of “ghosts in the marriage” that Olive and Lucy discuss. These ghosts are remnants of past relationships, regrets, and paths not taken that a person never shares with their partner. This highlights what Lucy points out: the impossibility of truly knowing another person. The past love of Sally, Olive’s mother, impacts her deeply, but Lucy also reminds Olive that it is “[s]ad for everybody, but especially for your father and Ruth, who didn’t even know they were living with these ghosts” (19). Lucy’s comment highlights how the past, even if it is unknown, shapes and informs the present.
Strout also shows the connection between the past and the present from a longer ancestral and cultural perspective. Strout uses Bob’s cultural history to explain aspects of his character: “[T]his is important to understand about Bob—the Puritans were very much against calling attention to oneself in any way. Generations of genes had not made much progress in taking away this particular aspect of Bob” (25). Strout also establishes the influence of a character’s religious culture: “Margaret Estaver had been raised a Catholic before becoming the Unitarian minister that she now was, and William had been raised a Lutheran, as his father had come over from Germany after the war” (25). While neither of them is still practicing the religion they were raised in, Strout points out that it still plays an important part in their lives, emphasizing that people’s lives are influenced by people and practices that come before them—factors outside of their control. As a result, Strout offers a perspective on how the past impacts the present. She focuses on those elements of the past that are out of her characters’ control, including elements they do not even know about.
The Ebb and Flow of True Connection
The characters in Tell Me Everything search for, find, lose, and regain connection throughout the novel, a process that Strout highlights is the natural ebb and flow of relationships and life. Strout fills the narrative with what Lucy and Olive call “stories of loneliness and love” (131). In the novel, Strout illustrates how the connection between two people isn’t a constant state—as Lucy puts it, “We are all standing on shifting sand. […] we don’t ever really know another person” (193). Despite this fact, Strout shows that people can temporarily find themselves deeply connected.
Strout explores the fundamental loneliness of humans throughout the novel but most clearly illustrates this through Lucy. The two people closest to her in the novel, Bob and Olive, both recognize her as lonely. Lucy admits to herself that she has become so good at being lonely. Lucy, however, recognizes that this quality isn’t just intrinsic to her but characteristic of all people. She understands it to be endemic and asks Olive to show her a single person who isn’t lonely. By emphasizing the universality of loneliness, the novel emphasizes the desire for connection that accompanies it.
In doing so, Strout also offers hope in the moments of connection that the characters experience. Even Olive, who is a notorious curmudgeon, experiences a deep connection with Lucy and an enduring connection with Isabelle. After one of their story sessions, Lucy tells Olive that she feels “[a] connection. Love. So thank you” (131). Margaret even recognizes this tension between loneliness and love and identifies Lucy’s loneliness as one of the reasons, paradoxically, that she can connect with Lucy. With Margaret’s insight, Strout establishes loneliness as a basis for connection rather than a deterrent.
Strout also considers how connection changes in marriage, including how it begins and evolves, its boundaries, tender moments, and secrets. Throughout most of the novel, Bob feels distant and disconnected from Margaret, even at times feeling repelled by her. However, when Matt asks what it is like being married, Bob tells him: “It’s good. What’s interesting about it is that you get to know each other in new ways” (246). Strout illustrates this statement through Bob and Margaret’s marriage. For most of the novel, Bob feels distant from Margaret, convinced that she doesn’t listen to him or care about his life. However, after Margaret experiences her job being threatened and Bob confronts her with her self-absorption, Margaret’s growth and change fuels a change in their relationship as well. Her sermons become more sincere, and she becomes genuinely interested in Bob’s life. Their regained intimacy illustrates Strout’s understanding of connection as ebbing and flowing over time, even with one’s closest relationships.
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