“The first months, they had slept holding each other. Neither one of them had held another person in bed all night for years....Olive would put her leg over both of his, she would put her head on his chest, and during the night they would shift, but always they were holding each other, and Jack thought of their large old bodies, shipwrecked, thrown up upon the shore – and how they held on for dear life.”
——————I hated her, loved her, disliked her, I didn’t mind her, I wanted to yell at her, I wanted to drag her to therapy.
She is empathetic, but not. She seems to be aware of everyone else’s behaviors but her own. She is narcissistic, but simultaneously mindful and thoughtful of others needs.
In this collection of short stories, Olive is threaded through each one, sometimes as a subtle extra or as sometimes the main character. Strout has a way of writing so honestly about the human condition. Her stories are honest, heartfelt, realistic, surprising, and both joyful and sad.
I never quite got to know Olive the way I wanted to, from her own perspective. I think largely, because she spends most of her life not knowing herself. But the way she is threaded through each short story made me feel like I could paint a perfect picture of her if I had to. I know her mannerisms, her presence, I could even predict her feelings in certain situations. I feel so intimately close to the people in the town of Crosby, Maine, where the book takes place. It’s weird how books can do that, isn’t it?
I think that’s what I love most about Elizabeth Strout and her characters. It’s not that they are particularly likeable, but that they are surprisingly real. The raw and honest emotions in both Olive Kitteridge (book 1) and Olive, Again (book 2) are a refreshing dose of relational honesty that I’ve been missing during the last year of social distance.
This was a 5 star book for me. It had a tone of sweet melancholy. There was no pretty bow, but a sense of peace as this chapter on the characters lives was closed.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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