Olive Kitteridge
Olive Kitteridge
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Elizabeth Strout on Olive Kitteridge
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A presence at the dishwasherOlive did not arrive as a concept or a theme. She arrived as a voice, unbidden, while Strout stood at the kitchen sink. The moment was specific enough that Strout has repeated it, word for word, across multiple interviews over many years.
I just felt this presence behind me, and I heard the inside of her head say, ‘It’s high time everybody went home.’ And I thought, wow, this is strong. I’ve got to get this down. So I went right down and wrote that. And that’s Olive. [paraphrased from audio]
That first fragment of Olive’s voice led not to a novel but to a single short story: Olive crashing her son’s wedding reception by stealing the new daughter-in-law’s clothes. The story made plain that this character was too large for one piece of fiction, but what shape the larger project would take was still completely unresolved.
I wrote the first ‘Olive’ story a number of years ago — the one where she steals her new daughter-in-law’s clothes at the wedding reception — and as I wrote it, I understood that this character, Olive Kitteridge, would someday have a book of her own. What form it would take, at that time, I didn’t know.
Suicide runs through several of the book’s thirteen stories, and the reason is personal. Strout has spoken about this only briefly, declining to elaborate, but the connection is direct.
There is a history of suicide in my family, and I think that it’s always been very compelling to me as a result of that.
Even the name Olive Kitteridge came from her own family’s history. The great-aunt who supplied it was, by Strout’s account, nothing like the character built around her name.
both names were in the family, I had a great aunt Olive, who was in truth a very sweet woman, not at all Olive Kitteridge, but the name Kitteridge was in the family as well, I just added the ‘e’ to it.
How she wrote it
Palate cleansers and a handwritten endingThe most immediate structural problem was Olive herself: too abrasive for a reader to spend three hundred pages inside her perspective alone. The solution was to dilute her presence across the book’s thirteen stories, letting other Crosby residents carry chapters in which Olive appears only at the edge of the frame.
I also felt that the reader needed to have the experience of this character presented — spread out — in a way that would make it most digestible, and that’s when I thought of having stories where Olive would make just a small appearance: palate cleansers, so to speak. And I am always terribly interested in point of view, so to see Olive in tiny glimpses from others in the community allowed the reader to get a fuller picture of her.
Behind the episodic form was a conviction about how communities actually work: no one person holds a complete picture of anyone else. Strout had originally planned to call the project “Olive Stories,” but as the pieces accumulated, she became more interested in how each resident’s partial view of Olive, seen from a different angle and distance, would together produce something closer to the full truth of her. [paraphrased from audio, Waterstones, “Elizabeth Strout: The Waterstones Interview”]
[paraphrased from audio] She had originally planned to call the project ‘Olive Stories.’ But as she assembled the pieces, she became more drawn to something else: the way different people in a community each know only a fragment of a person, and how seeing Olive through those different fragments would give readers a fuller picture than any single close-up view could.
When the thirteen stories were finally written, the question of how to sequence them resolved with almost no deliberate effort. One decision, though, she had made from the start: the book had to open with Henry Kitteridge, not Olive, so readers could settle into Crosby before meeting her directly.
Oddly when the time came to make the decision, they just seemed to slip into the order you now find them. It was almost as though there was no ‘conscious’ decision.
That apparent ease was the product of years of accumulation. By the time she needed to order the stories, she had lived with the material long enough that the sequence had already worked itself out below the level of conscious thought.
The last page of the book existed before most of the book did. Strout wrote it on a single handwritten sheet, set it aside, and buried it under the characteristic sprawl of papers she works from. Months later she found it, still intact, with a question scrawled in the corner.
I sat down one day and wrote the last page of the book. I had not even written — or even thought about — the story that came before that page. I had no idea at that time that Olive’s husband would have a stroke, that she would meet another man.
The personal thread
Maine women who didn’t soften thingsThe gruff, undeceived quality that defines Olive on the page has a specific biographical source. Strout grew up on a dirt road in Maine surrounded by elderly great-aunts who spoke about death and loss with an unsentimental matter-of-factness that she absorbed before she knew she was a writer.
There was a certain grumpiness to them, a certain Maine-ness to them. They — you know, they were all from there.
Strout later recognized that those women had probably all been compressed into a single composite: an Olive-type character assembled from a childhood’s worth of observation.
The question of what drives her as a writer has a consistent answer across decades of interviews. It is not moral clarity, and it is not the drama of extreme behavior. It is something closer to the texture of ordinary life resisting resolution.
It is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ that interests me as a writer, but the murkiness of human experience and the consistent imperfections of our lives.
What she wants us to sit with
The permission Olive gives usThe reason Olive can say what she says without alienating readers permanently is that Strout writes from a position of complete non-judgment toward her characters. She describes this not as a moral stance but as a source of pleasure, a freedom she enters the moment she sits down to work.
when I go to the page, I suspend judgment on my characters. And in real life, I’m sure I’m probably as judgmental as most people in real life. But when I go to the page, I am so free of judgment of my characters, and that’s so fun. It’s so liberating because I don’t care how badly behaved they are — as long as they’re truthfully bad behaved, I don’t care.
After a decade of thinking about why Olive, specifically, has connected with so many readers, Strout still has no complete answer. Her best guess has to do with the gap between what people feel and what social life allows them to express.
I think there must be a lot of things that people don’t say that Olive says for them.
The longer explanation Strout offered to The New Yorker names Olive’s complications as the source of the connection, but stops short of resolving the mystery. The candor of the uncertainty is itself part of the answer.
I do not know why Olive Kitteridge has resonated so much with people. I have thought about it, and I do not know why. But one thought I’ve had is that she is very complicated — as most of us are — and her complications are so out there that perhaps people feel connected to her for that reason.
What she does want readers to leave with is something more modest than insight and more durable than comfort. The formulation she gave the book’s reader’s guide strips away any consolation that doesn’t hold up.
we are all, more or less, in a similar state as we love and disappoint one another, and that we try, most of us, as best we can, and that to fail and succeed is what we do.