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The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout

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Among the joys of picking up an Elizabeth Strout novel: you know what you are going to get – in a most positive sense. You know the setting will be a quaint but somewhat struggling sub-suburban/semi-rural New England. You know the characters will be superficially unremarkable – no celebrities (or at least none who roll in their fame), no influencers with millions of followers, and almost no ‘social media’ (except of the traditional sorts: conversations, visits, dreams and daydreams, a few telephone calls and maybe even some paper and pen documents…). You know the incidents will all seem insignificant – until subsequent events and revelations show just how loudly they have echoed through a life or lives which you, by novel’s end, have grown to care about. Deeply.

In short, you’re going to get a highly sensitive, brilliantly insightful look at flawed yet still love-worthy human beings living the sort of challenges humans have lived for generations, despite whatever technological and sociological progress or regress the world around us may claim we have been making.

M. Strout does not write blockbusters; unless you count the way her authorial choices block-out the distractions that make us think we are different from one another or our ancestors.  Or the way she busts us out of the Edwardian clutter of irrelevancies which so often blind us to life’s uncertainty and tenuousness, its inevitable endings and the myriad inimitable beauties along its road.

If you’ve read Strout before and are closer to the end of life’s span than the beginning, The Things We Never Say is another delightful and rewarding chapter in her oeuvre.  If you’ve not read her before, start with one of her earlier works and save this latest until you’re ready to consider the things you have never said to those you’ve you loved, or they may never said to you.

  • My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), is a great place to begin your acquaintance with Strout.  If you come to love that world and want to linger inside it, there are four later related volumes: Anything is Possible (2017), Oh William! (2021), Lucy by the Sea (2022) and Tell Me Everything (2024). 
  • For an even deeper dive, start with Olive Kitteridge (way back in 2008) and its sequel, Olive, Again (2019), reading them either before, or as bookends to, the Lucy Barton series.

But please, if you don’t read many books, if you’re in your later years (like me), or if you’ve already read much of M. Strout’s earlier work, don’t hesitate to dive into The Things We Never Say.  You’ll find tons to love and care about, and more wisdom than most novels twice its modest 200 page length.

P.S. – speaking of things that deserve to be said, the new speculative fiction, E Unum Pluribus, is currently available online, in six free installments.

Packed with intrigue and fueled by politics, economics and murder (as well as gender, class, language and even the origins of faith), E Unum Pluribus imagines how the USA’s current culture wars may bring about its end, and how much we stand to lose if we let that happen. Anyone can read the novel totally for free simply by navigating to the home page of this website and selecting E Unum Pluribus from the top menu, or via this link: https://robinandrew.net/2026/01/01/e-unum-pluribus/

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Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout

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Reliably kind and astute, Strout is a treasure, mining small town Maine for evidence of the human condition; what it takes to survive childhood, adulting, family, romance, loss and the passage of time.

In this installment, we are reunited with aging versions of Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge and other characters from earlier Strout novels as they continue the messy business of life. The tale is structured around an unlikely relationship between Lucy, the oddball outsider and Olive, the life-long local and gossip coming to grips with the shrinking world of retired widowhood.

The stories Olive tells to Lucy (and others we glean along the way) eventually coalesce around one theme – they are all about secrets.  Bits of information perhaps insignificant, perhaps life-changing, which characters have kept from spouses, siblings, neighbors and often, sometimes for very long times, from themselves. 

Partway through what seems a familiar journey, Strout drops in a murder mystery, something readers of her earlier novels may find incongruous, even disconcerting.  That sort of drama is not her usual cup of tea. Characteristically though, the mystery develops gently and organically, out of seemingly small bits of character and behavior. For a time, it even seems to have drifted from the author’s attention, then is brought back into focus by other events before being solved well short of the novel’s end. Rather than the book’s raison d’être, then, we understand even murder as one more instance of secrets kept, or not.  More dramatic than most, but the same animal underneath its skin of violence.

Thus the title, Tell Me Everything, is really a misdirection: No healthy happy person actually tells ‘everything.’  And, if one does try to do so, they’d best be prepared for serious consequences. Sometimes, the path most conducive to happiness, the path of love and caring, may actually lead through the difficult decision to not tell everything, but to live with our secrets and let others live without having to confront them.

Simple insight on a complex reality. Sad and humorous, depressing and reassuring, life changing, life affirming, unremarkable and unavoidable and – in the right hands – captivating and moving.

Another gem from the lapidary mind of Elizabeth Strout.  May she live and write forever.