A decade after writing the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, the author, says that Olive just showed up again. “I didn’t expect her….That Olive! She continues to surprise me, continues to enrage me, continues to sadden me, and continues to make me love her.” The result of that unexpected visit was Olive, Again, a “composite novel” of short stories weaving around the prickly, difficult, intriguing, retired middle school teacher, Olive Kitteridge in the coastal town of Crosby, Maine. Strout explains her writing and relationship to the characters: “I don't believe in good or bad—that doesn’t interest me. What interests me is the murkiness of human experience and consistent imperfection in our lives… I don’t judge the characters. I just record their conversations and love all of them.” Olive is certainly imperfect. And, as a note, two of our book club members just couldn’t stand Olive and the others of us loved her and the book.

Olive is 77 when the book begins. In time, she marries, comforts and annoys others, suffers the indignities of aging, and ends up in an assisted living facility, wearing “Diapers for old people…my foolish poopie panties” that she buys at Walmart at 6 AM so no one can know she uses them. Age does soften her a bit. And 86, she makes a good friend at the assisted living facility, gets a typewriter and begins to write about her life. She types: “I do not have a clue who I have been. I do not understand a thing.” And, then, in Olive fashion, she gets up and goes to dinner. Thus ends the book.

Early in the book, she and Jack, both recently widowed, have reconnected. She refers to him as “Mr. Flub-Dub, old and sagging,” and he to her as a “tall, big; God she is a strange woman!” and kissing her is like kissing a “barnacle-covered whale.” Still, they marry and find love and solace in each other for a few years. Olive pictured them as “two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.” In her blunt, no-filter, busybody way, she’s often more truthful to others than herself. But Strout gives us some clues as to Olive’s actions by sharing her innermost thoughts throughout. Her favorite words are “Oh Phooey” when she disagrees or dismisses; “Oh Godfrey” when she’s surprised; and “Hell’s Bells,” “Crap” or “What a thing!,” an exclamation about just about anything.

At a shower where Olive continues to mutter, “This is crap.” as the gifts are passed around for everyone to admire and, then, she alone helps a very scared and pregnant girl sitting next to her deliver her baby in the back seat of Olive’s car. “What a mess.” In another story, there’s Cindy who is dying; no one visits her but Olive and their conversations are real and honest. “You know, Cindy, if you do die, we’re all a few steps behind you.”

There are parent-child challenges: The daughter who visits her parents to tell them she is a dominatrix and has to explain what that means; Olive’s challenges with her son, Christopher, and their difficult relationship, “She realized that she herself had raised a ‘motherless child, a long, long way from home.’” (He had moved to New York.)

There are hurts when Olive is snubbed by residents in the assisted living facility after she is rude to one of them. There are times when the best she can say is that she is “not unhappy.” There are real connections with others as Olive reaches out to her home health aid whom she immediately dislikes because of her truck’s Trump bumper sticker. She asks, “Betty, what is your life like?” Betty begins to share her difficult life and Olive listens.

There are suicides, abusive spouses, murdering sons, drug addicted neighbors, sexually awakening teens, and affairs all told in beautiful and straightforward prose, always surprising, often funny, offering no answers, but asking us to “to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.” Each story explores the scope of human experiences and, in spite of it all, the characters show resilience, imperfections, and humanity, an “Olive-ness,” as Jack calls it, to get through it.

—-Jane Hilburt-Davis