Literary Fiction · MelancholicA blunt retired math teacher in a Maine town, seen through thirteen linked stories
Olive Kitteridge
A retired schoolteacher sees everyone's flaws in her small Maine town, except her own
Olive Kitteridge is a retired schoolteacher in the small town of Crosby, Maine: sometimes stern, sometimes patient, and often blind to her own limits. She criticizes how her town and the world are changing, yet misses the changes in the people closest to her, among them her grown son, who feels smothered, and her husband Henry, whose loyalty is both a gift and a burden. The book is told in thirteen linked stories, and as the townspeople face problems large and small, Olive comes to understand herself and her life more deeply, often painfully, but always with blunt honesty.
More about this book
Who
Olive Kitteridge, a blunt junior-high math teacher, and her husband Henry, the town pharmacist. The first story follows Henry, who grows absorbed with Denise, a recent widow who works for him, even though he still loves Olive.
World
Crosby, a fictional coastal town in Maine, whose residents face problems large and small.
What makes it different
It is a short story cycle: thirteen stories that are linked but do not form one continuous plot. Olive is the main character in some and only passes through others, so you often see her the way her neighbors do. Six of the stories were first printed in magazines between 1992 and 2007.
Feel
Told with blunt honesty. It won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was turned into an HBO miniseries in 2014 starring Frances McDormand, and has a sequel, Olive, Again (2019).
Page count and cover shown for: Paperback
Further reading
- Strout talks about writing Olive KitteridgeThe Washington Post (via the author's site)
- Olive Kitteridge takes 2009 Pulitzer Prize for FictionThe Christian Science Monitor