Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Tell Me Who We Were: Stories
    Tell Me Who We Were: Stories
    Tell Me Who We Were: Stories
    Audiobook7 hours

    Tell Me Who We Were: Stories

    Written by Kate McQuade

    Narrated by Sarah Naughton, Sophie Amoss, Allyson Ryan and

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Infused with the keen insight of Joyce Carol Oates and haunting power of Kelly Link, a radiant collection of linked stories that explore the vulnerability, resilience, and hidden desires of women, following six girls over the course of sixty years, from their first semester at boarding school to the twilight of their lives.

    It begins with a drowning. One day Mr. Arcilla, the romance language teacher at Briarfield, an all-girls boarding school, is found dead at the bottom of Reed Pond. Young and handsome, the object of much fantasy and fascination, he was adored by his students. For Lilith and Romy, Evie and Claire, Nellie and Grace, he was their first love, and their first true loss.

    In this extraordinary collection, Kate McQuade explores the ripple effect of one transformative moment on six lives, witnessed at a different point in each girl’s future. Throughout these stories, these bright, imaginative, and ambitious girls mature into women, lose touch and call in favors, achieve success and endure betrayal, marry and divorce, have children and struggle with infertility, abandon husbands and remain loyal to the end.

    Lyrical, intimate, and incisive, Tell Me Who We Were explores the inner worlds of girls and women, the relationships we cherish and betray, and the transformations we undergo in the simple act of living.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJul 2, 2019
    ISBN9780062933508
    Author

    Kate McQuade

    Kate McQuade is the author of the novel Two Harbors. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Harvard Review, Shenandoah, and Verse Daily, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Lily for Washington Post, LitHub, and TIME Magazine. She is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Women’s International Study Center, and Yaddo. Born and raised in Minnesota, she teaches at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where she lives on campus with her family.

    Related to Tell Me Who We Were

    Related audiobooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Art After Sexual Assault

      Apr 21, 2019

      Art After Sexual Assault
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Brandon Taylor

      Dec 8, 2017

      I started the year thinking about plagues and calamities. Like many people, I felt particularly disturbed by the growing gap between what I felt was my lived reality and what was being reported in the news or in print. I read The Plague by Albert Cam

      2 min read

    • Article

      Samantha Irby On Oversharing And The Art Of Confessional Writing

      May 9, 2018

      Samantha Irby is not shy about her shortcomings. The blogger and author of the essay collections "We Are Never Meeting in Real Life" and "Meaty" writes both openly and hilariously about dealing with Crohn's disease, awkward dating experiences and bad

      4 min read

    • Article

      Ask A Literary Consultant

      Sep 3, 2020

      Ask A Literary Consultant
      2 min read

    • Article

      Yvonne Bailey-Smith: ‘I Can’t Believe The Things That Priti Patel Is Coming Out With’

      Jun 23, 2021

      Yvonne Bailey-Smith had a phone call last week from the former deputy head of her daughter Zadie Smith’s school. The deputy head didn’t want to talk about Zadie or her bestselling novels; she wanted to congratulate Yvonne, who at 67 years old has jus

      5 min read

    • Article

      Beetlemania

      Oct 9, 2020

      Beetlemania
      4 min read

    • Article

      Fiction To Look Out For In 2023

      Jan 1, 2023

      During the lockdown years, I kept reading articles by novelists saying how unproductive they were feeling, how virus narratives had colonised their subconscious minds, destroying the creative impulse. 2023’s novels – or at least those of them I’ve re

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Nadia Owusu

      Dec 15, 2020

      If anyone were to ask me for recommendations of books for America’s new leaders to read before they are sworn in, this collection would be on my list. The post A Year in Reading: Nadia Owusu appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Paul Tremblay

      Jun 17, 2020

      IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF MY BIGGEST FEARS that I would live to see the end of everything,” says Paul Tremblay, speaking to SFX from his Massachusetts home in the middle of lockdown. It’s a singularly peculiar time, and a peculiar interview for him to

      3 min read

    • Article

      Crimes of the Heart

      Nov 5, 2016

      Like many of his novels, Spanish author Javier Marías’ new book, Thus Bad Begins, isn’t exactly a mystery, though it is mysterious. Here, the 65-year-old perennial Nobel favorite tells the story of Juan de Vere, a young man working for a film directo

      1 min read

    • Article

      Romantic Entanglements Bring Humor And Heartache To Small Town

      Jun 21, 2021

      Katherine Heiny’s novel transplants readers to Boyne City, Michigan, through the keen eyes of the town’s new schoolteacher.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Shipstead, Ryan, Walker, and More

      May 17, 2022

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from Maggie Shipstead, Eimer Ryan, Sarai Walker, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millio

      5 min read

    • Article

      Where To Start With: Zadie Smith

      May 27, 2022

      Zadie Smith made a splash in the literary scene at the turn of the millennium with her debut novel White Teeth. She has since written everything from short stories to playscripts, and made headlines earlier this year when she sang with the BBC Sympho

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Tell Me Who We Were

    4/5

    38 ratings16 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Beautiful and poetic writing; playful use of voice, point of view, and genre; thoughtful and thought-provoking.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing collection of intertwined stories. The lyricism and depth of characterization make this a worthwhile read, but the aspects of fantasy and reality - and how we interpret those connections - make it a perfect one for me.I would have loved to have more, but the fact that I can't say specifically what was missing means that McQuade likely hit the perfect sweet spot on what to offer her readers without overwhelming them.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this collection of richly layered, lyrical short stories about the inner lives of a group of women. Interwoven in the stories are elements of magical realism, hinting at truths behind action, and serving as the myths (and sometimes the fairy tales) of human nature and what it is to be a woman. This is the type of collection that deserves rereading for both the masterful writing as well as the story construction and meaning.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed the first story but the rest kind of lost me. It took me awhile to figure out that each story was about one of the girls later in her life, but I kept forgetting who was who. For me, the stories would have hung together more if the events of the first story marked each girl in some way; as it was, they seemed unmarked by the tragedy of their teacher drowning. By the last two stories I was skimming, as the magical realism (which I do not relate to anyway) seemed out of place.
    • 3/5
      I guess my taste in short stories runs more towards Ann Beattie or Karen Russell—spare and realistic or fantastic. McQuade’s prose got in the way of the stories (for me). Several of them are linked by recurring characters introduced in the first piece; I was happy to leave them behind when I finished that story and felt no need to encounter them again. That said, “Ten Kinds of Salt” is worth a read.
    • 3/5
      A loosely connected volume of short stories, beautifully written if overall rather glum, thematically connected by a sort of nature-themed mysticism. Readers looking for a more plot driven book will be disappointed, but those who enjoy the kinds of short stories found in literary journals will find this the kind of thing they like.
    • 3/5
      Quirky, strange and original this grouping of connected stories follow the lives of did girls. Pre-teens, these six young ladies are best friends, dramatics the order of the day. Especially after their romance teacher, is found drowned at the bottom of a pond. Trying to figure out what happened, these girls will investigate, try unusual measures and come to a very unexpected conclusion. The ripple effects of this incident will haunt these girls throughout their lives.The following chapters each focus on a specific girl as they go through the various stages of life. They follow the many problems women face throughout their lives, each adding a strange twist or happening. Childbirth, invitro, marriage, divorce, death of a parent, the girls filter in and out of each other's life.This collection will not appeal to everyone as it is a times difficult to interpret what the author means to say with the different physical manifestation in the stories. If, however, you are looking for something well written and different these stories provide a unique reading experience.ARC from Library thing.
    • 4/5
      Well this is a great book with lots of insight and beautiful prose and yet it's just not for me. So I gave it four stars because I know it's well written. Seeing things exclusively from the standpoint of a younger person just isn't working for me at this point in my life. I need the adult perspective. So I got to the second story and the parents being seen from the eyes of their child after another child has left/disappeared and I'm missing the parent's perspective. Because I know they have it. Celeste Ng's book, Little Fires Everywhere, did that really well. You saw the young person's side but then she gave you the mom's side which was very different from what you would expect. It didn't excuse the adult behavior but it explained it. It gave me something I could use. So four stars because I'm sure it's a great book that I honestly couldn't get through.
    • 4/5
      "Mr. Arcilla died. . . Handsome and scruffy and achingly tall. . .He was just out of college. . . to teach twelve-year-old boarding school girls the fundamentals of Spanish and French. . . Spanish then French. . . He never made it to French. . . "Six twelve-year-old boarding school girls at the precipice of womanhood; all individually in love with their romance language teacher. Their budding pubescent lives firing up and things getting itchy in new places in their bodies. That time in their lives where they all felt daydreams foretold the future; where the difference between reality and imagination is blurred.Chapter One is a short story entitled, The Translator's Daughter, and is narrated by one of the girls as an older woman. She introduces Lilith, Romy, Evie, Claire, Nellie and Grace and reveals their interpersonal relationships, their individual backstories and their deep individual attraction to their twenty-five-year old teacher, Mr. Arcilla.When his body is discovered floating naked in a nearby pond, the girls are devastated and disconcerted to find themselves alone to sort out the meaning of life and death and to discover that Mr. Arcilla, the kind and patient teacher, did not share their affections. He turned out to be just an ordinary man with individual troubles not unlike themselves. The scars from this event would affect each of them for the rest of their lives. The slender thread of Mr. Arcilla's death is the only thing that remains of their friendships after they leave the halls of Briarfield."Mr. Arcilla. Our first real love, our first real loss. We felt it keenly then, as if he had left each one of us. . .without a good-bye. . . Cast aside. Disregarded. Left on our own, alone."We will again meet Lilith, Romy, Evie, Claire, Nellie, and Grace, featured separately in the next six stories. Each story, a slice from each girls’ future, as inspired by the works of poets and translators famous for myths about women.The author has done a nice job of maintaining the magical realism revealed in The Translator's Daughter in each of the subsequent stories. To quote the publisher who summarizes it best:"Throughout these stories, these bright, imaginative, and ambitious girls mature into women, lose touch. . . achieve success and endure betrayal, marry and divorce, have children and struggle with infertility, abandon husbands and remain loyal to the end."I particularly liked that the book is a short story collection. I savored one each night this week as I wound down my day. Readers of The Night Circus, The Snow Child and Life of Pi will find it appealing.
    • 3/5
      Tell Me Who We Were starts in the aftermath of an accident. The characters, young private school girls, are together in the first short story/chapter to introduce a small part of each of their personal stories for later. After that first chapter, the tale jumps ahead a few years to cover part of the story of one of the girls. Later, the tale jumps far ahead and by the end of the book - the last two tales - it's at the end of a character's long life and into the supernatural/mystical.The writing is strongest when there's character dialogue. The characters move the plot along better than the narrator and the narrator's voice is too lackluster, too removed from the emotion of the situation. That equates to a little more than half the book being decent and a little less (the narrator-driven) being a bit weak. I wish the first story was longer, to better-establish the girls as I had some trouble remembering who was who when their part of the story as adults came up later. I also think dipping into the supernatural for the last two (or to be fair, maybe just the final story) hurt the overall narrative. It would have been stronger to keep the telling in the concrete world...there was plenty of interesting places to go with the last character. Returning to the lie from the first chapter would have been the best thing to focus on since it created such a big potential for a plot. Why'd she lie? Was that a pattern throughout her life? Was there a bigger final lie?
    • 3/5
      Overall, I found the stories in Tell Me Who We Were uneven. Some, like Wedge of Swans and In The Hollow, were rich and touching, while many of the others fell flat. The premise is that six adolescent girls are all present at a traumatic event at their boarding school and each story in the collection centers around one of the girls later on in her life, but the girls were so interchangeable that I kept having to flip back to the initial story even to know which of the characters in any given story was one of the girls from that night. I’d say this one might be worth getting from the library, but give a pass to buying it.
    • 3/5
      I am an avid short story reader and was intrigued by this collection’s structure of related characters. The writer’s style is more ethereal and magical than I prefer, though. I couldn’t connect enough to truly enjoy any but the first story.
    • 5/5
      Mr. Arcilla, a language teacher at an all-girls boarding school, has drowned and it has sent his young students spinning. Lilith, Claire, Romy, Grace, Evie and Nellie struggle to find understanding of this loss as Mr. Arcilla was their first true love. They learn that Mr. Arcilla was nude when he was found and that leads them to believe he had been with his lover that evening and they try to work out who that would have been. This defining moment in their young lives will have an effect on them their entire lives.This is a series of interconnected short stories following the lives of these young girls. The stories are inspired by myths about women. This author is a fearless one and she has her finger on the pulse of what being a woman is all about. Although these women may have led different lives from mine, I recognized each of them in a deep way. She covers all areas of women’s lives – their young girlhoods, their loves, their marriages, their desire and fear of having children, their losses and even a bit of their afterlife.There is such beauty and magic in this book that I don’t even want to start another book for a few days. I just want this one to sit simmering in my heart for awhile.This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      the prose was lovely, but I really struggled to remember which girl was which, and ultimately this collection left little impact.
    • 4/5
      In this collection of 8 short stories, Kate McQuade explores the lives of six girls, starting off in the first story with the death of a beloved teacher at their boarding school. The stories are all interconnected as the group goes on to live their womanly lives – through relationships, marriage, children, infertility, and death. It’s a well written collection, often haunting, and demonstrates the emotional impact of good short fiction. McQuade is excellent in the stories about the girls, and I especially liked the story “Ten Kinds of Salt". It starts out: “The summer the animals began to disappear was the summer of the pink fires…”
    • 4/5
      "Roll back time like the blanket it is and you can still see them, those summer nights of fourteen years old."What a good sentence that is, and what a good book Kate McQuade's first short story collection is. This is one of those collections where the stories are so linked that it could easily be considered a novel. But why quibble? Regardless of how we classify it, it's good stuff.The idea is clever: beginning with a single life-changing event, she traces the ripple effects on the lives of six school friends into adulthood. Each of McQuade's girls emerges as a complicated and deeply human character -- she really gets into the interior space of each girl. As successfully drawn as each individual portrait is, it's their relationships together that connect the stories and give the book its backbone.McQuade's prose is lyrical and beautiful. There are moments of tenderness, but there's also dark humor and a magical sort of weirdness. All in all, it's a strange and wonderful package: elegant and witty and disconcerting. She keeps us off balance in the best sort of way. More than any other book, I was reminded of Jeffrey Eugenides' THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. I enjoyed this book immensely. Strongly recommended.(Thanks to William Morrow for an advance copy in exchange for an unbiased review.)