Olive, Again

Olive, Again is a novel-in-stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge. While Olive, Again is technically a sequel to Olive Kitteridge, it can be read as a standalone. The heartbeat of the novel is protagonist Olive Kitteridge, a woman from Crosby, Maine who has lost her husband, Henry, and in this new book reconnects with Jack, a man who loves Olive though he observes that kissing her is like kissing a barnacled whale. In other words, Olive doesn’t have the disease to please. She can be rude, abrupt, direct, insecure, cantankerous—and funny. A retired teacher who has entered the latter years of her life, she struggles against loneliness, against the vagaries of aging, to understand whether she’s been a good mother to her son, Christopher, to decide whether she can embrace life with a new man. All the stories in the novel—whether about a teenaged girl trying to figure out how to relate to her mother and to reckon with her dawning sexuality; about two brothers and the secrets they keep; about Olive’s inability to feel the love she thinks she should for her grandchildren; about what it is to surrender to mortality or to a new friend’s kind shoulder—remind us that we are all human, we all get sad and lonely, and that kindness and humor are the balm that saves us. And also that a town like Crosby is like a canvas, a tiny universe in which anything can and does happen, and every human emotion is contained.

Book club questions for Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

Have you read Olive Kitteridge? If so, what kind of older woman would you expect Olive to be?

If you haven’t read Olive Kitteridge and this is your first experience of Olive, what’s your first impression? Do you see her as being compassionate, or just plain old harsh?

Jack is in love with Olive but the way he describes love doesn’t exactly reflect the kind of romantic love we’re used to finding in fiction or movies. Do you think the love between Jack and Olive is “true love”?

In the chapter titled “Cleaning”, Elizabeth Strout writes of the “stink of loneliness.” In one way or the other, each of the book’s characters experiences loneliness, and deals with it in a different way. Did you find it elevating to think about how loneliness is something no one is immune from, and if not, what was your response?

In the chapter titled “Motherless Child” Olive think she overhears her daughter-in-law referring to her as a narcissist, and Olive looks up the meaning of the word, and takes umbrage—she doesn’t think she is one. Do you think Olive is a narcissist? Was Ann even talking about Olive?

The chapter “Helped” is fairly unrelated to the previous plots. Do you like Elizabeth Strout’s novel-in-stories approach, and if so why? If not, why not?

Do you notice how some of Elizabeth Strout’s characters from previous books (e.g. Olive, Jack, the Burgess Boys, Isabelle) appear in this novel? What do you think this says about Elizabeth Strout’s creative process, i.e. that she’s not just done with her characters when she’s finished a book?

In the chapter called Light which so beautifully describes the light during the month of February, only Olive is able to comfort a woman who may be dying. Why do you think Cindy finds Olive’s words and visits so helpful, perhaps more so even than when her husband or other loved ones try to comfort her?

In the story “The Walk,” a random encounter enables Denny to turn over a new leaf, to feel reinvigorated in his life. And there are other examples of seemingly random encounters elsewhere in the book that prove pivotal in helping someone through something. Can you think of examples of when a random encounter in your life set things on a different course?

In the story “The Exiles”, what do you make of that last scene, when Bobby and Helen seem to be saying that they love each other?

Suicide is a sub-theme in several of the stories, and looming death is everywhere. What did this novel make you feel about aging and mortality, and was it hard to read about, or did you feel, yeah, we’re all in this together?

Just when you think Olive is facing her final days, she decides she wants a typewriter and starts writing, and enjoys the rose bushes planted outside her window. How did you read this? Do you think despite all the losses and hardships and illness, Olive still finds joy in the world?

Whether you are young or old or somewhere in between, did this novel change the way you will look at the old people you see walking down the street, even if that old person is you?

Olive, Again Book Club Questions PDF

Click here for a printable PDF of the Olive, Again discussion questions

This Book of the Month and discussion guide are shared and sponsored in partnership with Random House, an imprint of Random House.