Tell Me Three Things Study Guide

Julie Buxbaum received her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and then went on to earn a law degree at Harvard Law School. Though she worked in the legal field for a while, she quit so she could write her first novel, The Opposite of Love, in 2009. Though her first two novels were intended for adults, Buxbaum realized that she enjoyed writing for teens much more after she published her first young adult novel, Tell Me Three Things, in 2016. Tell Me Three Things was inspired by several events in Buxbaum’s life. Like the protagonist, Jessie, Buxbaum lost her mother when she was 14 years old. She was inspired to write the novel after the birth of her second child, as she contemplated the fact that her mother was never going to see who she became as an adult. At one point in her life, Buxbaum also received an anonymous encouraging email, just as Jessie does. Buxbaum currently lives in London with her husband and children, and she continues to write young adult novels.

Tell Me Three Things centers around Dad’s remarriage after Jessie’s mom dies of cancer. In the past several decades, it’s become slightly less common for people to remarry after losing a spouse (though the likelihood that someone will remarry goes up with age). It is, however, more common for men to remarry than it is for women, and men tend to do so more quickly. It’s also fairly common for men to run into opposition from friends and family members who believe that they’re moving on and remarrying too quickly, which Dad and Jessie struggle with in their relationship. Jessie also voices a number of other fears and observations that allude to statistics surrounding remarriage and blending families, such as the fear that a person remarried for money, and that in the aftermath of losing a spouse, men are more likely to struggle to get through day-to-day routines, especially concerning housework, alone. In terms of Jessie’s experience, her life is ruled by standardized testing and anxiety surrounding college admissions, which reflects the realities of growing up in mid 2010s America. She and her classmates worry specifically about the PSAT test, which high school students take as both a practice for the SAT and to try and qualify for the National Merit Scholar program and accompanying college scholarships.

Jessie and Ethan in particular are well-read teens; they read and love classic novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, unspecified works by Jean-Paul Sartre (who’s most famous for his philosophical essays like Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism), and they speak specifically about Jessie’s mom’s love of Gertrude Stein, specifically the book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and the poem “Sacred Emily.” They also read T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land for their English class. Some writers and critics suggest that it’s possible to trace the prevalence of well-read teenage protagonists of young adult novels to John Green’s novels, such as Turtles All the Way Down and Paper Towns. Tell Me Three Things also shares broad similarities with other young adult novels that tackle blended families, such as Susin Nielsen’s We are All Made of Molecules, as well as with those featuring young protagonists dealing with the loss of a parent. Deceased or otherwise absent parent figures are a common occurrence in young adult literature in particular and show up in a variety of subgenres, from more realistic fiction like in Nicola Yoon’s Everything Everything to fantasy novels like the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series.