Olive Kitteridge

By Elizabeth Strout

When she saw the FOR SALE sign in front of the house she and Henry had built for Christopher, it was as though splinters of wood were shoved into her heart.

Oh, the beautiful writing of Elizabeth Strout. I resisted reading her work for years, while she was busy acheiving critical acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize among many others. Finally, when listening to an interview with an author I admired, she said she thought Elizabeth Strout was the best writer she’d read.

Really?

So I exchanged my resistance for curiosity and dove into her early writing. Perhaps when I’d first read her work I hadn’t had the life experience to appreciate what Elizabeth Strout did with her writing, and the brilliance of it. Perhaps I didn’t have the experience plodding along as a writer to see her genius.

But this time, I did.

I didn’t want to like her protagonist Olive Kitteridge. I didn’t want to identify with her. She was an aging, cratchety, no-nonsense former math teacher in a small town. She was still surrounded by her former students, now on their own trajectory into middle age.

But I fell in love with her. I thought about her all the time. When one of the stories Strout included in the book had Olive only in the periphery, I read quickly through it, rushing to get back to Olive. I think, now, a lot about why I fell in love with Olive. And I decided it is because she is a character I can trust. She doesn’t seem to have the capacity to play emotional games, which usually puts her on the fringe of the inner circle. But I know I can trust that what she says is really what she is thinking. And what she is thinking is a pretty good barometer of what she is feeling. Her feelings reside deep in her character. And just when I think Olive will not be able to absorb any more pain from her family, or her former students, she works her thoughts like a cleanly resolved quadratic equation and finds a response which makes me ache with the pain lying beneath it.

I do love Olive Kitteridge. And though I am much more a “wear it on your sleeve” type when it comes to emotion, I also identify with her. Aging has its own indignities. But also it’s own dignities. And we as humans get to choose which we will embrace. Olive kept showing me how to embrace the dignity.

After all, life was a gift—one of those things about getting older was knowing that so many moments weren’t just moments, they were gifts. No matter what people’s lives might hold…still and all, people were compelled to celebrate because they knew, somehow, in their different ways, that life was a thing to celebrate.