Olive Kitteridge

I just finished reading, "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout. This is probably a book that I would have had by my bedside for months without reading it if it had not been chosen for book club this month. Olive is an large, opinionated, and unsentimental woman whose presence is woven in and around the lives of the people in her small town of Crosby, Maine. At times I identified with Olive. I can be as unsentimental and opinionated as she. Towards the end of the book, I began to identify less with Olive and more with her grown son, Christopher. Olive started to take the form of a someone or another that I may have known at some point in my life. I believe that we have all known an Olive Kitteridge at one time or another. Certain themes are constant, illness, death, suicide, loving and loveless marriages, people living lives without ever saying what they really mean. This is the stuff of daily living, life stripped of excess. Olive faces this life in a frank and non-questioning way, bad things happen, if you don't think so, then where have you been?