Tell Me Everything: Oprah's Book Club: A Novel

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About this read

“Tell Me Everything “, author Elizabeth Strout,copyright 2024. Her latest, A Novel.

I read It fast, to fast, as I always do. They are all so good reads.

I have read everything Mrs. Strout has published all of them. All. And as this book title says, she tells you everything. She does.

The characters, in her books are so like: us, you, them, the person in the checkout line, at the market, the person you thought you knew, a friend at a party you didn’t know and probably will never know.

Highly recommend this read. And all of them.

But if you have not read Elizabeth Strout’s writings , read: All, all of them.

“My Name is Lucy Barton”, yes read that one soon, could be a start, even though they’re not sequel books.

Some of the same characters do pop up in lots of her books:

My Name is Lucy Barton The Burgess Boys Lucy by the Sea Oh William! Olive Kitteridge

And my favorite character is Olive!

Elizabeth Strout writes deep, you know what I am saying, how you talk to yourself deep. …and don’t think about it….and don’t talk about it.

Well, she just writes like that, our thoughts, you know.

“Ay-yuh” she does, and it’s funny , and serious and it’s ok to think these things, cause we all do . Life is complicated and What is it all about? And then we just laugh.

I do think we all have unrecorded lives. Unrecorded stories deep inside that should be told.

Get now and go get a copy of Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel “Tell Me Everything”

and don’t think about it.

Tinabeth Chapman

We meet many of the author’s, Elizabeth Strout, family in this book. I call them family even though they are not related to Elizabeth. But, they are figments of Strout’s imagination. They all have great qualities, and the ones we read the most, Olive, Lucy and Bob reveal their true selves.

What is the point of life? The characters ask, What is the point of life, of this story? Read along and you will make your own decisions. Men, women, hate, sex, love, and every emotion is here. There are many stories, and they do, indeed, have much to tell us. As usual Strout gives us a remarkable book. I am in my 80’s and have read thousands of books, I am a constant reader. Elizabeth Strout is my favorite author. She grabs me and pulls me in. I am in mourning when I have finished her latest book. Each book is stand alone, but you would be wise to start with her first book and work your way through to garner the most info about the characters. I envy you. . You will not meet another author like Elizabeth Strout.

Recommended Highly.

prisrob 09-19-2924

My heart is full and bursting with gratitude after finishing this book. I have read all of Elizabeth Strout’s books but this tops them all for me. I’m blown away by her ability to intertwine her characters and that we get to watch them grow. Her characters are all so beautifully human. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I recommend it with my whole heart.

I was honored to hear Elizabeth Strout deliver a keynote address in Florida a couple of years ago and to have a few minutes to speak with her afterwards. I told her of my conviction that she deserves the Nobel Prize for her body of work, especially for THE BURGESS BOYS, which tells so much of our national struggle with immigration, and LUCY BY THE SEA, her novel about the first year of the COVID pandemic. She seemed startled at the idea, but also grateful, in that self-effacing way of hers. If I could speak to her again, I would tell her that TELL ME EVERYTHING makes me even more certain that she should be honored with that international award. So much about this latest book is the universal story of what it means to be human and to survive and sometimes not survive. It tells about my own family in such a profound way that it kept me up most of the night. I have not felt so grateful to a novelist since I first discovered the work of Willa Cather, some decades ago. It was an injustice that Cather never received the Nobel. I hope Strout will get her due and stand in the footsteps of Toni Morrison, Sigrid Undset, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Pearl S. Buck, Doris Lessing, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, and other great laureates of literature.

I devoured this in 3 sittings and am now a bit sad to say goodbye to our friends in Crosby and Shirley Falls. Strout’s writing is so simple and readable yet effused with deep tenderness between the various characters’ relationships. I especially loved the Matt Breach and Jim Burgess subplots and how both affected Bob. Margaret deserves her own story and backstory. Love this and returning to Burgess Boys now.

Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again are two of my favorite contemporary novels of all time, so I was really looking forward to this book. The Olive moments didn't disappoint - she's just as salty and inwardly caring as always. The character is Lucy is well-drawn as well - she's dreamy and full of love of all people and the world, yet prickly when poked. I also liked the character of Bob, whose thoughts on his bad haircut reminded me of the sweetly humorous insightful character studies of Anne Tyler. However, the story, unlike the stories within the story, dragged along for some reason. It was difficult to care about the woman who got murdered or the back story of her family, for some reason. I know that the story needed some sort of plot, but I'm not sure a murder mystery was a good fit to the character development within the story. I kept skipping ahead to the places where Olive and Lucy meet up and had hoped that there was more here. I also wished to know more about Margaret and Bob's relationship and Margaret herself, how she became a pastor, for example. This book will still find its place on my shelf with the Olive books, but it was not as satisfying of a read by a long shot.