Culture This & That

September 2, 2023

By Samara Gation

Cue Eminem: “Guess who’s back, back again. Olive’s back. Tell a friend. Guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back… Nanananaaaaaa….”

It’s Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout’s octogenarian retired schoolteacher who knows everyone in her hometown, and she’s almost as grumpy as ever. Time has softened her a bit, but not much.

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout spans about a decade, picking up where its prequel, Olive Kitteridge, left off. Olive has just met her second husband, Jack. Though the fictional town of Crosby, Maine is small, there are still many characters to keep track of, and blunt and indelicate as ever, Olive continues to push her way into her fellow townspeople’s lives. Lucky we get to trail her and watch the tea unfold.

We follow Olive as she goes on her daily coffee and two-donut runs, long walks, trips to the grocery store, and not-quite-so-social visits, always running into former students who are now middle aged with complicated lives. Everyone is connected to everyone, and as we move through this collection of stories, we get delightful (sometimes unpleasant) offhand updates on everyone’s lives.    

We meet too many people to painstakingly detail, but some of the highlights include Olive helping a young woman deliver her baby in the back of her car, sternly ordering her à la Olive to “Stay calm!” We meet a young Irish girl, mourning her father, cleaning houses for pocket money, and discovering her sexuality in a most awkward (nay, cringey) style. We watch Olive grapple with her son, Christopher, now a surly father of four, still living in New York but who comes back to visit his childhood home with his peculiar brood. We meet a young lawyer who has just lost her elderly father in a fire, also dealing with her guilt over a recent extramarital affair. We tag along as Olive forms another refreshingly honest relationship with a former student battling cancer. We run into an older man on his nightly constitutional, reminiscing about an old crush with a tragic story. We learn more about and meet someone from Jack’s salacious past. They’re loosely related stories, giving us deeper glimpses into Olive and her Crosby, Maine hometown.                

All the while, Jack is the delightful Yin to Olive’s Yang. A former Harvard professor, he handles Olive’s strong opinions, gruff moods, and capriciousness with amused aplomb. He loves Olive for being Olive, reminding her that she is the perfect wife for him, entreating her now and again to be just a little less Olive with him even if it means she needs to be more potently Olive with others so they can continue to love each other in mostly peace.  

A lot happens over the span of just a decade, and much more over Olive’s long life. Olive, Again reminds us life can be good to the last drop if we just hang on.

Photo credit: Amazon