57 pages • 1 hour read
Colleen OakleyThe Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Colleen Oakley
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses domestic abuse and sexual assault.
Colleen Oakley is a best-selling fiction author based in Atlanta, where The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise takes place. She has published five fiction novels that all focus heavily on character-driven narratives and the exploration of various types of relationships: platonic, romantic, and familial. Oakley has also worked as a magazine writer and editor, with pieces appearing in publications such as The New York Times, Parade, and Marie Claire. Oakley’s novels have won a variety of awards and have been translated into over 21 languages.
Oakley’s novels often look at love through varying lenses, and the resulting relationship pairings are unconventional: two strangers who keep dreaming about each other (You Were There Too, 2020), a librarian allergic to human touch and a struggling single father (Close Enough to Touch, 2017), a widow who pretends her husband is still alive and the journalist fascinated by her (The Invisible Husband of Frick Island, 2021). The core love in The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise isn’t romantic, though there is a blossoming romantic relationship between Tanner and August. Oakley shifts her primary focus away from romance and onto the friendship that grows between Tanner and Louise as they journey across the country together. Love is still a key topic and appears across the novel in a variety of forms. Tanner learns to love herself outside of the context of her athletic success, Louise learns to love herself enough to forgive herself for her past mistakes, and the pair learn to open themselves up to the platonic love slowly building between the two of them.
Cultural Context: Heists in Pop Culture
Heists are a common topic in popular culture. From movies like Ocean’s Eleven (which Louise explicitly references in the novel) to novels like Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery (1975), heists have captured the human imagination for over a century. Oakley engages with this tradition of the heist narrative in The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise.
Heist narratives often follow a classical structure: the planning of the heist (which, Louise remarks, takes up “ninety percent” of Ocean’s Eleven), the execution of the plan, and the reveal of how it happened. Oakley, however, turns this structure on its head, instead leaving the reader slightly in the dark throughout the novel as to what heist, if any, Louise carried out. There is no planning montage, though Louise often alludes back to the events of 1975 in her thoughts. Instead, the “big reveal” at the end of the novel—in which it becomes clear that Louise thought that she was being pursued for the kidnapping of Jules, not the theft of the jewels—is when Oakley reveals that Louise and George carried out Salvatore D’Amato’s heist plans during Louise’s stint as Salvatore’s nanny. There is also no execution section; instead, the details of the Copley Plaza heist are revealed early on in the text during the news broadcast that Tanner sees in Atlanta. These are discussed in more detail in the case file that Special Agent Lorna Huang reads while trying to find Tanner and Louise. Oakley includes all of the elements of the classic heist in this novel, but she scrambles the order. It is not until the final reveal that the reader finds out about Louise kidnapping Jules and then robbing the Copley Plaza Hotel with George, but that reveal is all internal in Louise’s head. Tanner doesn’t find out about the hotel robbery until Louise gifts her the Kinsey Diamond on her deathbed.
Tanner and Louise’s adventure across the country takes up most of the novel, with interspersed chapters about the Wilt siblings and the authorities investigating Tanner and Louise’s disappearance. The heist is both at the forefront of the novel and in the background; it is central to the plot, but the plot doesn’t revolve around it. The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise is a heist novel, but it bucks the norms of the genre by placing friendship at the core of the narrative.
Artistic Context: Thelma and Louise
As the female protagonists’ names suggests, the 1991 film Thelma and Louise provided significant inspiration The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise. It tells the story of the eponymous women who set out in their car on an adventurous vacation. When a man in a bar tries to rape Thelma, Louise shoots him, and they go on the run to Mexico because they fear that no one will believe their story. It later transpires that Louise is a survivor of rape herself. The women spend the film attempting to escape both the authorities and men who harass them.
Thelma and Louise is an example of the road movie genre, in which characters go on a long drive that alters their perspective on life. The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise is a literary version of this genre, as both Tanner’s and Louise’s perspectives change while they embark on a similar journey to the west. This time, however, instead of portraying a friendship between two young women, Oakley portrays the Louise figure as older; she teaches Tanner important life lessons about womanhood and the Pursuit of Adventure.
Oakley’s reworking of Thelma and Louise brings its theme of Misogyny and Feminine Rage to her contemporary readers. In an interview in which she confirms that this film was a starting point for the novel, she comments that when she first watched the film as a teenager, she “didn’t understand everything that women have to face” but she “knew that [she] was angry a lot of the time,” and Thelma and Louise made her feel “validated in [her] anger” (“Interview with Colleen Oakley—The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise.” Thoughts from a Page Podcast, 2023). Female rage appears in the novel, such as when Louise attempts to protect her neighbor from her abusive partner (like Louise protects Thelma in the film) and Tanner comes to terms with her escape from sexual assault (like Thelma) and believes that no one would support her if she attacked the perpetrator. Oakley hence draws attention to aspects of misogyny that persist in society by reworking a film from several decades prior.
