48 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth StroutOlive, Again
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Value of the Unvarnished Truth
Olive Kitteridge, the protagonist of Olive, Again, is irritable, rude, and often unsympathetic. She is a complex character that often does unlikeable things. She is difficult, blunt, and, to the other characters, sometimes terrifying. Many, however, value what makes Olive difficult—her unwavering, blunt honesty. Olive offers the other characters the unvarnished truth which, no matter how hard to handle, is a refreshing change from the small lies and evasions most practice to keep relationships easy and intact. Olive, whatever else one might think of her, is a truth-teller, and it is a quality that many of those who know her value.
Cindy Coombs, Olive’s friend, appreciates that Olive is up front with her. Most people don’t know what to say to Cindy since she is undergoing cancer treatment. In contrast, Olive approaches even the most sensitive topic, death, with composure: “‘You know, Cindy, if you should be dying, if you do die, the truth is–-we’re all just a few steps behind you. Twenty minutes behind you, and that’s the truth’” (127). This gives Cindy a larger perspective on her situation.
Jack, Olive’s husband, also appreciates Olive’s honesty—it’s one of the things he loves most about her. Even Lisa quotes Olive from a long-ago classroom, when Olive interrupted a math lesson to tell the children: “‘You all know who you are. If you just look at yourself and listen to yourself, you know exactly who you are. And don’t forget it’” (231). Lisa remembered Olive’s bluntness, her departure from the way that adults often evade complex topics with children; it helped shape her life.
Olive is not just the deliverer of uncomfortable truths. When faced with disturbing facts about her own behavior with her son, Christopher, and first husband, Henry, Olive at first denies them. However, she then questions herself, her memories, and the ways in which she understood those relationships. She reevaluates her past behavior, and comes to a new understanding about herself. For example, when she sees Ann yell at Christopher in front of other people, she feels ashamed, as she recognizes her own behavior in Ann’s actions. When she begins to understand that the way she treated Christopher was abusive, she feels guilt and accepts Christopher’s attitude toward her. This new understanding of her life and relationship with Christopher may be uncomfortable, but it leads her toward greater understanding and contentment.
Olive also treasures honesty from others, making friends with Isabel after she realizes: “By God, she’s honest” (276). She recognizes this quality earlier, too, in Andrea, the poet who, Olive is forced to admit, is more insightful than herself. Honesty and the willingness to listen enables Cindy, Jack, Lisa, and most of all, Olive, to grow and change throughout the book. Olive recognizes the power of the unvarnished truth to transform lives. She is willing to risk social awkwardness and discomfort to speak the truth.
Human Connection: Do We Ever Really Know Each Other?
Throughout this collection, all of the characters struggle with loneliness and a feeling of disconnect. Olive, Again grapples with the idea that, although we may be surrounded by other humans, we are all essentially alone—in death, but very often in life as well. Jack realizes after waking from a nightmare—“he was alone with his nighttime dream. As people always are, with these things” (169). In spite of this, characters experience deeply meaningful connections, offering hope.
Olive and Jack may have times when they feel like they don’t know each other, or even themselves. But throughout the text, Jack instinctively understands Olive, reflected in his love of her. He sees her irritability and bluntness for what they really are: fear and brutal honesty. Often, their connection seems to be almost instinctual, as when Jack echoes Olive’s unspoken thoughts: “The stupidest thing you ever did was go to that baby shower” (40). Olive is “stunned for a moment” by Jack’s understanding (40). In moments like these, with Jack, she no longer feels alone, even though the moments are fleeting.
Strout emphasizes that the key to true connection is blunt honesty and vulnerability. When the characters open up about the fears that all humans face, their fears are alleviated by the true understanding of another human. Olive and Cindy Coombs connect through their honesty and their willingness to be vulnerable. Olive offers Cindy truths that most people, because of her terminal illness, avoid saying to her. She broaches the topic of how we face mortality, and helps Cindy to feel some empathy for her husband, Tom. She addresses Cindy’s illness in blunt terms: “‘Hell of a mess to be in’” (125). Olive’s honesty and willingness to discuss Cindy’s illness are what Cindy values most about Olive’s visits.
Towards the end of the book, Olive and Isabel find support and comfort with one another. At first, their similarities seem superficial: They both married pharmacists and are from Shirley Falls, among other things. They build an even deeper connection through honesty, telling the truth about themselves even when it may make them unsympathetic or unlikeable. Isabel admits: “I really was not a good mother,” and Olive responds with her own truth: “Well, I wasn’t a good mother, either” (277). This allows them an intimacy and for them to be fully seen by one another, at least for a moment.
Strout suggests that we must respect the choices that others make, even if we don’t understand them. As Bob says—“it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect” (195). Strout implies that the answer to the loneliness we all face is honesty, respect, and empathy.
Identity: Do We Ever Really Know Ourselves?
Olive, Again explores the shifting nature of identity through a number of characters. Olive and Jack try to come to grips with the way their self-identity has changed with age, and are forced to reevaluate their pasts from a different perspective.
Early on in the book, Olive begins to be uncertain of her identity, of what she thought she knew about herself. When she sees Ann yelling at Christopher in “Motherless Child,” she recognizes her own behavior with her first husband, Henry. This, along with the burgeoning realization that her treatment of Christopher was abusive, begins to shake the foundation of what she knew about herself: “It came to her then with a horrible whoosh of the crescendo of truth: She had failed on a colossal level. She must have been failing for years and not realized it […] and it had to have been there for years, maybe all of her life, how would she know?” (91). Olive works to understand and accept new ideas about who she was, and who she is. She begins to be able to navigate outside her fear, and to accept the consequences of her behavior.
In ”The Poet,” Olive realizes that Andrea saw her clearer than she saw herself, and if that was true, she wonders, did she ever know her husbands: “Who were they, who had they been? And who—who in the world—was she?” (217). Olive is forced to reconsider everything she thought she knew about herself, and stops trusting her own perspective. She realizes that everything she thought to be true of herself could no longer be counted on: “‘I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing” (290). Her identity has been dismantled.
Jack also struggles with his idea of who he is, or was. Jack is also concerned that “he had lived in a way that he had not known […] It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived him. And it meant that he did not know how to perceive himself” (166). If he can’t trust what he had always believed to be true about himself, how can he trust the way he sees things, or anyone else’s perspective for that matter? Jack has not only lost his identity; he has lost the confidence that he can even identify his reality, or judge his own behavior.
As their identities shift, Olive and Jack have more empathy for others. Jack understands Olive deeply, the fact that she is brusque and rude because she is anxious. And Olive begins to understand her relationship with Christopher and why he is the way he is. When Olive moves into the senior living apartments, after initially reverting back to her old behavior, she incorporates new truths about her identity into her friendship with Isabel.
In the end, both Jack and Olive reach the same conclusion: that they do not know themselves. Jack, sitting in his chair at the end of “Pedicure,” reflects—“what frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing” (166). Olive echoes this in the final words of the book: “I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing” (290). On the surface, these lines may seem tragic. But they actually reflect a deeper understanding, along the lines of a saying attributed to Socrates: “I know that I know nothing.” Recognizing one’s lack of knowledge means that one has grown.
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