Tell Me Everything Study Guide

Strout, the daughter of two professors, was raised between Portland, Maine and Durham, New Hampshire. After attending Bates College for her undergraduate degree, Strout studied law at Syracuse University—and graduated with a JD the same year her first short story was published in New Letters magazine. After briefly practicing law in upstate New York, Strout moved to New York City, where she taught community college and spent six years working on what would become her first novel. Strout then published this novel—Amy and Isabelle—in 1998 to widespread acclaim, earning a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner award and building an artistic partnership with television personality Oprah Winfrey that would extend throughout Strout’s career. In the years that followed, Strout authored Olive Kitteridge (winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize), The Burgess Boys (2013), and My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), creating many of the characters who would later populate Tell Me Everything. Strout lives between Brunswick, Maine and New York City with her husband, a former Maine attorney general; her daughter Zarina Shea is a successful playwright in her own right.

Strout’s novel is set in the years after the COVID-19 pandemic forced people across the world into isolation. Many of the characters in Tell Me Everything are still grappling with the impacts of COVID, even if the national quarantine has ended—Pam, for example, struggles with a drinking problem she developed while socially distancing, while Charlene Bibber encounters rising rent prices as New Yorkers flee the COVID-riddled city for more rural environs. The other historical sequence that pervades Tell Me Everything is the increased polarization in American politics, implicitly linked to the Trump and Biden presidencies (though these figures are never named in the novel). Many of the characters lament how “divided” the country is, even fearing that the United States might be headed to a civil war. And while Tell Me Everything at first demonstrates how people with different political beliefs might still be able to connect, over the course of the novel, political divergence becomes prohibitive even in the most intimate friendships. 

Elizabeth Strout often cites the Russian masters—Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Leo Tolstoy—as influential on her work. But the most important literary context for Tell Me Everything is the interconnected world Strout herself has created. Nearly all of the characters in Tell Me Everything have appeared before in Strout’s fiction. Amy and Isabelle is about Isabelle Goodrow’s relationship with her daughter; Olive Kitteridge explores Olive’s family history in detail; The Burgess Boys follows Bob and Jim Burgess as they help their sister Susan through a painful moment in her family life; and My Name is Lucy Barton, Oh, William!, and Lucy by the Sea all explore Lucy Barton’s marriage to her first husband William.