Olive, Again was published by Random House in 2019, eleven years after the original Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer Prize and five years after the HBO miniseries brought the character to a wider audience. Strout returns to the story-cycle format, following Olive from her seventies into old age through thirteen interconnected narratives set in and around Crosby, Maine.
The older Olive is recognizably the same woman — blunt, impatient, capable of sudden kindness that surprises herself as much as its recipients — but age has softened some edges and sharpened others. She enters a second marriage with Jack Kennison, a retired Harvard professor, that is both companionable and contentious (Olive and Jack bicker like people who have earned the right to disagree). She watches the community around her change — young families arrive, old friends die, the town becomes both more cosmopolitan and more lonely. She confronts her own mortality with the reluctant honesty that is her most characteristic trait.
Strout uses Olive’s advancing age to explore the landscape of late life with a specificity that is rare in American fiction. The physical indignities — the loss of mobility, the shrinking of the world, the dependence on others — are rendered without sentimentality but also without the condescension that younger writers sometimes bring to elderly characters. Olive is not wise (wisdom is not in her nature) and she is not resigned (resignation would require a serenity she does not possess). She is herself, diminished by age but not diminished, fierce and lonely and alive.
As in the first book, the community stories provide context and counterpoint. A young couple navigates an unexpected pregnancy. A kayaker is rescued from the bay by a woman whose own life is in quiet crisis. A man returns to Crosby to deal with his late mother’s house and finds himself confronting his own failures. These stories are not “about” Olive, but she moves through them — observing, judging, occasionally reaching out — and her presence gives the collection its unity and emotional weight.
Collecting Olive, Again
First edition (Random House, New York, 2019): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$10