Tell Me Everything

Who is telling a story plays a large part in how a story is shaped, and people understand its meaning. Throughout Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout explores the issue of how the storyteller shapes the story by considering perspective in several different ways. She immediately establishes perspective as a concern of the novel by creating an omniscient narrator who speaks to the reader in a technique called “direct address.” By doing so, Strout draws attention to the storyteller, whose identity remains unknown but has insight into the characters’ histories and their futures.

Strout also highlights the importance of the storyteller in Lucy and Olive’s meetings. They use the stories they tell as a framework to explore larger, more existential questions like what a person’s life means. As they do, they also take pleasure in the storytelling itself; when Olive says, “But that’s not part of the story,” Lucy replies, “We don’t know if that’s part of the story or not” (16). Lucy is a writer and has thought about the importance of perspective. Her point of view and questions often force Olive to confront the way her storytelling has shaped her family’s history and mythology.