The Comfort of Pamphlets and Starfish

In her 2008 novel, Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, a social worker, discusses the sorrows and comfort that residents of Crosby, Maine, encounter. Before reading the novel, I had always believed that people find comfort in people. Perhaps I thought that comfort requires words or an acknowledgement that the other person lives. However, after reading Olive Kitteridge, I now recognize that people seek comfort in objects and memories and that such comfort proves fragile. For example, following the death of her husband, Marlene Bonney sobs to Olive about a basket with trip pamphlets that she and her husband had put together and mourns how they “made believe we’d [Marlene and her husband] go places together” while he was ill (179). Strout highlights the denotation of “made believe” to emphasize that Marlene seeks comfort in an illusion. Furthermore, by employing a mournful tone, the novelist stresses Marlene’s pain in seeking relief from her husband’s illness in an object, and further accentuates the fragility of the woman’s comfort. Similarly, Anita Harwood lives with the pain of her father’s death and seeks comfort in a starfish. When redecorating a room, Anita sends her daughters to collect starfish to attach to curtains. Her daughter, Julie, describes to her younger sister that their mother’s father “used to bring her starfish” (184). By highlighting the emotional association Anita has to starfish, Strout implies that the woman seeks comfort in the starfish as they preserve her father’s memory. Furthermore, Anita’s attempt to involve her daughters in her personal comfort implies that she wishes her children to better understand her, and through her memories with the starfish, acknowledge why her father’s loss pains her. However, when the starfish begin to smell in the living room, Anita throws them back into the ocean, releasing “a little scream” when she throws the last one (185). Through the desperate diction of “scream”, Strout creates a painful tone and implies that the impermanent nature of Anita’s object of comfort causes her even greater anguish. Therefore, Strout emphasizes that the memories and meaning that individuals attach to objects in which they seek comfort proves painful due to an object’s fragility. Overall, I have realized the danger in storing memories and seeking comfort in a single object as although it does not live, when the object must go, I may mourn the fragility of my comfort.