Welcome to Gap Fest Reeds for September 24. I'm David Plotz. One of the hosts

Slate's Florida GabFest. Millions of people across the United States are close observers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the MCU,

which are interconnected stories of super heroic and super villainous characters who are flung across the galaxy.

And if there's a new movie in the MCU, it sets hearts of flutter and opens pocketbooks.

I would argue that there's a certain

smaller but equally passionate set of fans. And for those fans, there's the ESU, the Elizabeth

Strout universe, interconnected stories of extremely ordinary and not really villainous,

regular humans whose adventures, such as they are, are flying across a couple

of places in Maine, occasional side trips to New York City or Illinois. For fans of the

Elizabeth Strout universe, another book by Elizabeth Strout is cause for an immediate visit to a

local independent bookstore and extreme curiosity. What is Lucy Barton up to? What about the Burgess brothers?

And most of all is Olive Kittridge still alive? Has she softened? So I am so happy to be here with

Elizabeth Strout to talk about tell me everything, her latest beautiful empathic, even slightly

suspenseful novel set in the familiar town of Crosby. Maine.

Liz Strout, welcome to GabFest Reeds. Hi, thank you so much. It's really nice to be on here. Thank you very, very much. I assume you're talking to me from Maine. Are you talking to me from Maine? No, I'm talking to you from New York City at the moment. Oh, man.

I was trying to, you know, I wanted some weather, some scenic weather, the state of the leaves on the trees. I was just talking to my husband. It's absolutely gorgeous up there. Lots of green fields and starting to turn leaves. Well, the state of the leaves on the trees is like a, is it definitely a minor plot point and tell me everything. So I wanted to know what was happening.

So, so there's a corpse and a murder and a lovely New England small town at the heart of

tell me everything.

But this is not like a murder she wrote kind of book.

Did you conceive of this book as a murder mystery?

Or was it always book about human beings and the murder just kind of showed up? That's really interesting. I think that there were a couple of different things. One was wanting to get Lucy with Olive because I just thought that would be fun. And then the murder thing, I think I intended it to be a much larger part of the book. But then as I realized, as I was writing the book, that no, it's just going to be one more piece of the book. And it sort of settled down a little bit at that point into just part of the narrative. Yeah. So it's much more important than murder. The book has things that are much more important than murder in it. I love, I love incidentally, I mean, how there is this story. And it does sort of track a little bit as a mystery. And yet it becomes clear as a reader that you're just like, oh, you don't need to really pay. This is not going to, this is not going to be an Agatha Christie situation. It's just not.

No, right. I mean, I guess you tell the book from three, the perspective of Bob Burgess, the mostly

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