Read An Exclusive Excerpt from Olive, Again By Elizabeth Strout

Oprah has just announced her latest Oprah's Book Club Pick is Elizabeth Strout's "Olive, Again." Here, Strout shares an exclusive excerpt called "The Poet"—the first story the author wrote in the book. In this short tale, Olive Kitteridge bumps into an old student of hers, Andrea, who has recently wrapped up her tenure as America's poet laureate—much to the surprise of her former math teacher.

"The Poet" embodies what makes Strout's writing so sublimely wonderful: humor coexisting alongside heartbreak, the essential moments of grace shared between very different people. Check out the exclusive excerpt below.

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On a Tuesday morning in the middle of September, Olive Kit­teridge drove carefully into the parking lot of the marina. It was early—she drove only in the early hours now—and there were not many cars there, as she had expected there would not be. She nosed her car into a space and got out slowly; she was eighty-two years old, and thought of herself as absolutely ancient. For three weeks now she had been using a cane, and she made her way across the rocky pathway, not glancing up so as to be able to watch her foot­ing, but she could feel the early-morning sun and sensed the beauty of the leaves that were turned already to a bright red at the tops of the trees.

Once inside, she sat at a booth that had a view of the ocean and ordered a muffin and scrambled eggs from the girl with the huge hind end. The girl was not a friendly girl; she hadn’t been friendly in the year she’d worked here. Olive stared out at the water. It was low tide, and the seaweed lay like combed rough hair, all in one direction. The boats that remained in the bay sat graciously, their thin masts pointing to the heavens like tiny steeples. Far past them was Eagle Island and also Puckerbrush Island with the evergreens spread across them both, nothing more than a faint line seen from here. When the girl—who practically slung the plate of eggs with the muffin onto the table—said, hands on her hips, “Anything else?,” Olive just gave a tiny shake of her head and the girl walked away, one haunch of white pants moving up then coming down as the other haunch moved up; up and down, huge slabs of hind end.

In a patch of sunlight on the table Olive’s rings twinkled on her hand, which sight—lit in such a way—gave her the faintest rever­beration of surprise. Wrinkled, puffy: This was her hand. And then, minutes later, just as she had put another bite of scrambled egg onto her fork, Olive spotted her: Andrea L’Rieux. For a mo­ment Olive couldn’t believe it was the girl—not a girl, she was a middle-aged woman, but at Olive’s age they were all girls—and then she thought, Why not? Why wouldn’t it be Andrea?

The girl, Andrea, sat at a booth by herself; it was a few booths away from Olive, and she faced Olive, but she sat staring out at the water with tinted glasses halfway down her nose. Olive placed her fork on her plate, and after a few moments she rose slowly and walked up to Andrea’s booth and she said, “Hello, Andrea. I know who you are.”

The girl-woman turned and stared at her, and for a moment Olive felt she had been mistaken. But then the girl-woman took off her tinted glasses and there she was, Andrea, middle-aged. There was a long moment of silence—it seemed long to Olive—before Olive said, “So. You’re famous now.”

Andrea kept staring at Olive with eyes that were large, her dark hair was pulled back loosely in a ponytail. Finally she said, “Mrs. Kitteridge?” Her voice was deep, throaty.

It’s me,” Olive said. “It is I. And I’ve become an old lady.” She sat down across from Andrea, in spite of thinking that she saw in the girl’s face a wish not to be disturbed. But Olive was old, she had buried two husbands, what did she care; she did not care.

“You’ve gotten smaller,” Andrea said.

“Probably.” Olive folded her hands on the table, then put them onto her lap. “My husband died four months ago, and I don’t eat as much. I still have an appetite, but I’m not eating as much, and when you get old, you shrink anyway.”

Andrea said, after a moment, “You do?”

“Shrink? Of course you do. Your spine gets crunched up, your belly pops out—and down you go. I can’t be the first person you’ve seen get old.”

“You’re not,” Andrea agreed.

“Well, then. So you know.”

“Bring your plate over,” said Andrea, looking past Olive to where Olive had been sitting. “Wait, I’ll get it for you.” And she scooted from her seat and in a moment returned with Olive’s plate of eggs, and the muffin, and also Olive’s cane. She was shorter than Olive had thought: childlike, almost.

If there was one student Olive had had over her vast years as a seventh-grade math teacher, if there was one student who was not going to be famous, it was Andrea L’Rieux.