Tell Me Everything: To Be Listened to Is to Be Seen

At this year’s closing event of Festivaletteratura in Mantova, American novelist Elizabeth Strout captivates the audience with a conversation on her latest book Tell Me Everything. As Italian writer Laura Imai Messina aptly puts it, the novel is a “feast” of Strout’s beloved characters. Many of the well-known characters from previous books, such as the Pullitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge come together in the small Maine town of Crosby. For Strout, this return was an organic unfolding of voices she has been listening to for years.

“It starts with a character, not with an idea”, Strout explains, whimsically adding “I don’t have ideas!” Names, she admits, are essential to this process: “If I don’t have a name right, it won’t work at all”. Sometimes they arrive instantly, other times only after long reflection. But once a name takes root, so does the character. I concentrate so hard to make sure I stay true to them. It is a matter of deep, deep concentration to figure out who they are. And of course they relate to someone, so from there it grows”.

Strout’s literary power lies in rendering the ordinary extraordinary. “Ordinary persons are extraordinary”, she states. “They have deep internal worlds, they are resourceful, they are courageous. I am available to these things and to see people not as we might think on a first impression”.

When Messina asks about darker themes, she draws a careful distinction: “I do think evil exists, but I’m not interested in writing about it. Ordinary people do terrible things, because we have so many things moving through us. But evil is not the same as a broken person. The mixture, the stuff that mingles in us, that’s what I am interested in".

Age brings with it many things, among them new insights, especially about listening. “I have come to understand that people do not always listen carefully to each other”, Strout reflects. Listening, she suggests, is not passive but an active practice, a tremendous gift. “To be listened to is to be heard is to be seen”.

For Strout, this also reveals a deeper likeness among people: we are more alike than we are different. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here”, she adds with a smile, noting that something in her novels must have resonated across cultures and languages.

Perhaps that is the quiet power of Strout’s fiction: her characters remind us that beneath the surface we share the same wish to be loved, to be heard, to be seen.