Normally, these ‘Books Worth Keeping’ posts focus on a single work recently encountered and found (in one necessarily limited and idiosyncratic opinion) to be worth remembering and sharing.  This time around, although I’m spurred by a specific book (“Tell Me Everything”), the subject is its author.

In this reader’s view, anyone who aspires to be a writer would do well to read Elizabeth Strout’s novels and consider deeply what she does and how she does it.  Under the guise of limited lives in a limited setting, Strout illuminates the unlimited breadth and variety of what it is to be human. Out of deceptively ‘ordinary’ situations and circumstances, she mines complexity and contradiction (apologies to Robert Venturi for stealing your phrase) as her utterly believable characters struggle to understand themselves and the selves of those with whom they live, die and, especially, love.

Many other authors and books* are similarly revealing and rewarding, but few are as consistently insightful, illuminating and uplifting. 

Elizabeth Strout’s works are a treasure.

*Mary McGary Morris’s A Dangerous Woman, Clare Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, and Michael Dorris’ A Yellow Raft in Blue Water come quickly to mind, as do the works of Emma Donoghue, Kate Atkinson, William Boyd, Ian McEwan and… Thankfully, the list goes on and on.