Author Elizabeth Strout, a Bates College graduate, sits for an interview at the school in October 2019. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

It just makes sense to Elizabeth Strout that three of her best-known Maine characters would all inhabit the same book.

Maine’s not that big a place – at least Strout’s fictional Maine isn’t. Two central locations of her novels, the coastal town of Crosby and the downtrodden mill town Shirley Falls, are only about 45 minutes apart.

Crosby is where Olive Kitteridge lives. She’s the prickly retired school teacher and focus of two Strout novels. It’s also where Lucy Barton, a New York writer, went to quarantine during the pandemic in the 2022 novel “Lucy By the Sea,” after appearing in previous Strout novels. And Crosby is now the home of lawyer Bob Burgess, whom readers first met in “The Burgess Boys” in 2013. He left his boyhood home in Shirley Falls, moved to New York City, and is now living by the sea in Crosby.

Random House via AP

Strout’s new book, “Tell Me Everything,” marks the first time that these three Maine characters – probably her best-known and best-loved – fully interact with each other in a novel. They did all appear in “Lucy by the Sea” but really weren’t engaged in each others’ lives. Other characters from previous Strout books, including Bob Burgess’s brother Jim, also show up. When the book came out Sept. 10, critics and readers were excited by the idea that Strout was bringing together the worlds of so many of her characters.

Olive, living in a retirement home now, asks her friend Bob for an introduction to well-known writer Lucy, who is a fairly new resident of Crosby. Their visits and stories are a backdrop to the larger plot, including the mystery of a woman’s body found in a quarry. Bob becomes involved in the murder investigation and continues his close friendship with Lucy.

It’s almost like a Marvel comics movie, uniting different heroes from previous stories but all from the same universe, so to speak.

Strout’s own literary universe goes back to her first novel, “Amy and Isabelle” in 1998, and includes nine other books. “Olive Kitteridge” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 and was adapted into an HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand as the title character. “Tell Me Everything” was announced as an Oprah’s Book Club pick when it came out, as was “Olive, Again” in 2019.

Strout, 68, was born in Portland and grew up splitting her time between Harpswell and Durham, New Hampshire, where her father was a professor whose focus was parasitology – the study of parasites – at the University of New Hampshire. She got an English degree from Bates College in Lewiston in 1977, then a law degree from Syracuse University, and worked briefly in legal services before moving to New York City and becoming an adjunct professor of English at Manhattan Community College.

For years, Strout has split her time between New York and a home on the Midcoast, but she says these days, she’s spending more time in Maine.

Before leaving for a book tour that started on Sept. 11, Strout talked with the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram about “Tell Me Everything” and the characters she brought together in it. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Author Elizabeth Strout knows her way around Maine, including the places she creates for her books. Photo by James Tierney

Why did you decide to have these three characters come together in a book? When did you start thinking you might do this? 

I hadn’t been thinking about it, because I never intend to write about these people again. Never. But then I end up doing that. I think at some point, I guess almost all of a sudden, I realized, “Wait a minute, these people are all living in the same town.” Olive and Lucy and Bob, Bob’s sister is only 45 minutes away in Shirley Falls, and that means Jim Burgess (Bob’s brother) would come to visit too. I just thought, “Oh, let’s get Lucy and Olive together and see what happens.” And I think that was the initial genesis of the book. But rather early on, I realized I want this to be mostly about Bob. So I went ahead.

I’ve read where people call Olive, Bob and Lucy your three most-beloved characters. Do you look at them that way? 

Oh, I love them all. Anybody I’ve ever written about, I love. I don’t care how badly behaved they are. You know, that’s their business.

How have the characters changed since we first met them in earlier books? 

Well, I think the biggest change for Lucy is that she no longer lives in New York City. She’s come up to Maine. She’d never been to Maine before she came up for the pandemic with William, and then they ended up staying in Maine. And so that’s a huge change for Lucy. Her daughters are far away from her.

And then Bob is just, you know … he’s gotten older. He’s Bob. He’s been married to Margaret now for about 15 years, and he’s just sort of settled into his life up here in Maine. He’s older and a little bit sadder, maybe, but not deeply sad. He’s just always got his little Bob stuff going on.

And then Olive is just Olive. I think she’s still pretty prickly, but she’s older, she’s really old, and she understands that. She knows that this is the final stage of her life.

What do you mean by “his little Bob stuff?” How would you describe Bob?

As soon as I started to create Bob, I realized he’s just so fundamentally decent, and yet he doesn’t have a clue. He’s not a reflective man. He doesn’t know that about himself at all. He does have his secret sadness, because for so many years of his life, he thought that he had been responsible for his father’s death when he was a child. He’s just so decent, and his brother is the perfect foil, because Jim is kind of awful. Yet I love Jim as well. Jim shows up in this book rather humbled by many things that have happened to him. But Bob has always been very dear to me ever since he first arrived, and he remains very dear to me.

Is Crosby based on any particular Maine town? Some guess it’s Harpswell, where you spent a lot of time growing up.

It doesn’t seem to me to be Harpswell or any place that I can really put my finger on. It’s just a place that I’ve been visualizing in my head for years, a combination of different places.

Author Elizabeth Strout spends more of her time in Maine these days. Photo by James Tierney

What sort of challenges did you face in trying to figure out how these characters would interact? 

Lucy and Olive, that was really fun. I mean, the moment you put Olive on the page, for me, it just crackles and pops. That was not really difficult, once I figured out, “OK, I’m going to have their motif be that they tell each other stories.” Olive is curious about people. She has a deep curiosity. And of course, Lucy is a storyteller, and so they’re going to sit there and swap stories.

The difficulty came in writing about Bob, because it’s much more difficult to write about a really decent, nice man. Where’s the drama going to come from? I mean, OK, so he’s nice, but how are we going to show that in a way that’s interesting to the reader?  So with Lucy and Bob, I had to just make sure that I really heard them, you know, to hear their voices talking to each other. As long as I followed Bob truthfully, then I could do it.

When did you start writing this book? 

I think I started it rather soon after “Lucy by the Sea.” (That’s when) she and Bob had started their little friendship, and that was always a little bit intriguing to me. They are sort of perfect friends, given who Lucy is and  given who Bob is. I think there was a part of me that wanted to find out more about that as well. I thought, OK, let’s just see what happens to them as they continue their friendship.

Since Lucy is a writer and lived in New York City, is she based on you? 

No. I understood the moment I wrote the Lucy books in the first person, and then I made her a writer, people will think she’s me. I do use my experience in New York City to develop her experience there, but she’s not me. All the characters are partly me, or I wouldn’t be able to write them. Every character I write has to have some germ of something that I have known.

Has Crosby changed as much as real-life Maine has, considering the influx of people and soaring housing prices since the pandemic?

That’s why I spend the first two pages really describing Crosby and talking about the changes that have occurred, you know, particularly since the pandemic. People aren’t especially happy to have Lucy Barton in town. She was never even a tourist in Maine, she just comes up and buys this house. Housing is skyrocketing and people who thought they would buy a new house can’t now, because of people like Lucy Barton. That’s all in there.

Do you have plans to write about these three characters again? Do you have an idea for your next book? 

I’m writing a book that’s entirely different. It’s not even taking place in Maine. I have a whole new character. So a fresh sheet of paper completely. I’ll just say this, he is a 57-year-old high school teacher, and he is the nicest, most ordinary person. But the whole point is that he’s not, because he’s extraordinary. I think every ordinary person is extraordinary.