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. 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.”

There was a time when Elizabeth Strout’s fans had to wait a few years for the next book; but Tell Me Everything follows fast on her two previous novels – part of what she has termed a ‘marathon’ of writing in her sixties. It has been an extraordinary creative flowering: a diverting pleasure for admirers of her psychological perceptiveness and her ability to transport us instantly to Crosby, her fictional town in contemporary Maine. Strout once described her characters as rolls of fabric, with her novels as her patterns to cut out. Much material is used in each novel, yet there is a lot of spare, too. It’s the fullness of these characters and their inner lives that give her work its depth. No character is underwritten or a flimsy cameo – men and women at the centre of earlier books are on the periphery of this one, but as fully realised as those who take centre stage. Their rich inner lives allow them to be a part of the world beyond Crosby.

The Booker-nominated Lucy by the Sea (2022), in which the writer Lucy Barton and her ex-husband isolated together, took stock of the pandemic with startling power, almost as it unfolded. It was something that convincingly happened to the characters in the same way as it happened for us. The pandemic’s aftershocks are still felt intensely in the latest book. Here, political division and tension are evident, as though Crosby, with its spectacular foliage and brutal winters, were a small town that you can’t quite find on the map. Though Strout has been prolific in the past decade, the episodic style of her writing was formed much earlier in her career, when she juggled life as a mother and teacher. Her novels have always collected effective scenes, but here she has gathered all of her favourite characters. There’s Olive Kitteridge (who won Strout the Pulitzer prize when she introduced the world to this monumentally difficult woman in 2008); the lawyers Jim and Bob, the tragic siblings of her bestselling The Burgess Boys;and my favourite, Lucy Barton, whose imagination and empathy have catapulted her to fame in New York, and to a life beyond her anxieties and traumatic childhood. It’s Lucy’s fascination with ‘unrecorded lives’ – the ordinarily tough life, perhaps, she might have had were she not a confessional writer – that is at the heart of this book, and of Strout’s whole fictional project.

The phrase is almost an echo of George Eliot, whose Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life could also be a series of interconnected novellas. In her depiction of a small town and its men and women, Eliot insisted that their lives mattered: The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. Strout’s view of America, and the world at large, is not nearly as optimistic. Bob Burgess, Lucy’s friend (and almost more in this novel’s painful love story), believes that the bigger picture is bleak: When Bob thought about the state of the country these days, he sometimes had the image of a huge tractor trailer rumbling down the highway and the wheels, one by one, falling off.

Yet Strout’s characters seem to offer great solace. They have a resilience, despite the difficult situations in which they find themselves, or in which they’ve been brought up. Lucy has a capacity for understanding which is in itself a cause for optimism, and always a reason to read and re-read Strout’s books. NEW YORK (AP): Oprah Winfrey ‘s latest book club pick will be a story of familiar faces – in more ways than one. Winfrey announced Tuesday that she had chosen Tell Me Everything, the new novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. It’s the second time Winfrey has cited a book by Strout, whose Olive, Again was a 2019 selection. And it’s a return to popular literary territory, Strout’s fictional Crosby, Maine, as the author continues the lives of such favourites as the elderly and unbowed Olive Kitteridge and the renowned scribe Lucy Barton.

“Elizabeth Strout welcomes us home again, back to the small town where we witness the interconnection of all the characters we’ve ever loved in her previous novels,” Winfrey said in a statement. “It’s a beautiful read reminding us that there is extraordinary love in ordinary actions.” Strout is best known for the million-selling Olive Kitteridge, a series of interrelated stories that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 and was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand. Strout’s other books include Amy and Isabelle and My Name Is Lucy Barton. “The first time Oprah called me was extraordinary,” the author said in a statement. “The second time she called me was absolutely astonishing! Two times she has chosen a book of mine for her book club and I am so humbled that even though I supposedly ‘use words’ there are almost no words I have to say how grateful I am to her. She has done an amazing job to help people of this world discover and read books; to me Oprah is a rock star.”

Oprah’s 107th Book Club Pick, Tell Me Everything, features many recurring characters from her earlier work (including Oprah’s 82nd pick, Olive, Again). Here’s your definitive guide to where they show up and how they connect. The character of Olive Kitteridge popped into Elizabeth Strout’s head, fully formed, while the author was loading the dishwasher. “She was just standing by the picnic table at her son’s wedding,” Strout recalls. Soon, that image became a book, and that book won a Pulitzer, and Elizabeth Strout never planned on returning to the titular character again. Nonetheless, a decade later, we got Olive, Again. Oprah selected the novel for her Book Club, and Elizabeth Strout once again committed to leaving the character alone—on the condition that Olive could return the favor. “I really do think my days with her are done,” Strout told Deborah Treisman of The New Yorker back in 2019. “But how do I know? She showed up before—twice—and theoretically she could, God forbid, show up again.”

In Oprah’s most recent Book Club pick, Tell Me Everything, Olive indeed returns—and she is not alone. Throughout Strout’s work, 25 characters appear in more than one of her novels; Tell Me Everything features 23 of them. For an author renowned for her ability to capture the overlapping histories and rich particularities of each and every character, bringing so many of them together is an ecstatic gift to her readers: a literary fantasy fulfilled. It’s not just people that Strout returns to; seven of her ten novels are set in the same region of midcoastal Maine where the author grew up and still lives now. Though her characters live in the fictional towns of Crosby, Shirley Falls, and West Annett, her close connection with the landscape itself, she tells us, seeps into all her writing, including her three books not primarily set in the state.

In addition to providing a nostalgic backdrop, these close-knit coastal towns function as active forces in Strout’s novels, with town gossip and constant run-ins—facts of life in small rural communities—keeping the plot at a constant boil. In Tell Me Everything, forced proximity is not just the fire burning beneath the story, but the spark that ignited it. Strout tells us she was inspired to write the novel after realizing, at the conclusion of her previous novel, Lucy by the Sea, that “all these people I’ve written about are actually now living in Crosby, Maine,” including the arguable stars of her series: Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. “It just tickled me to think of getting those two together,” the author says. “So I did.” As you can see in the chart above, the only two recurring characters Strout leaves out of this reunion party of a novel are Lois Bubar (William’s half-sister, featured in Oh, William! and Lucy by the Sea) and Joanne (William’s “other woman,” who appears in the same two novels as Lois, as well as in My Name Is Lucy Barton). But it would take a very scrupulous reader—or one conveniently armed with a comprehensive diagram—to even notice their absence. All the major players are accounted for, and, without giving too much away, the novel ends with a sense of resolution. By the final page, Oprah says, she felt we had “come to a way of summarizing everything that’s been going on in these characters’ lives in the years that hadn’t been accounted for”—leading her to ask the author, “Is this the end of Crosby, Maine, and all the characters there?” Strout replies that “it very well may be,” acknowledging that the conclusion “felt a little bit final” to her as well. But don’t be too quick to mourn the end of these interlocking stories. As Strout says, “I never intend to write about a character again, and then I always do.”