Our Souls At Night

“I made up my mind I’m not going to pay attention to what people think. I’ve done that too long—all my life. I’m not going to live that way anymore.”

Addie explains to Louis how her attitude to other people’s opinions has changed with time: She has lived much of her life doing things according to what seems proper to others, but now she’s decided to live according to her own needs. As the story opens, those needs include having a companion to talk to at night to fight off The Pain of Loneliness.

“How strange this is. How new it is to be here. How uncertain I feel, and sort of nervous. I don’t know what I’m thinking. A mess of things.”

This is Louis’s response when Addie asks how he feels on the first night he sleeps over at her house. His reaction sounds like that of a young person on the brink of a romantic relationship rather than that of a widower in his seventies, signifying that Late-Life Love is accompanied by the same feelings of excitement and uncertainty as younger romantic relationships. This is the start of a new take on life for Louis.

“Sometimes I hate this place, she said. Sometimes I wish I had gotten out of here when I could. These small-town small-minded pissants, she said.”

Ruth complains about the gossipy nature of small towns after a grocery store clerk makes a snide remark about Addie and Louis. Though Ruth is older, she is a freethinker who is critical of the townspeople’s small-mindedness. From Ruth’s strong reaction to the cashier’s remark, Addie understands that Ruth knows about her and Louis’s sleeping arrangement and that she doesn’t judge Addie for it.

“But I think I regret hurting Tamara more than I do hurting my wife. I failed my spirit or something. I missed some kind of call to be something more than a mediocre high school English teacher in a little dirt-blown town.”

Louis’s description of his affair with Tamara shows that it was less about the sex and romance than about taking chances and proving to himself that he was more than the person with the mediocre, uninteresting life he felt he’d turned into. However, duty and responsibility to his family pulled him back.

“I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That’s a sin.”

Louis regrets not visiting or even saying anything to Addie after she suffered the losses of her daughter and then her husband. He now realizes that she was probably very lonely and isolated and his staying away was more to keep himself comfortable than to be of comfort to her.

“But that’s the main point of this being a good time. Getting to know somebody well at this age. And finding out you like her and discovering you’re not just all dried up after all.”

This statement of Louis’s to his daughter Holly reflects one of the main themes and the premise of the novel: Late-Life Love. The relationship revitalizes both Louis and Addie and brings them unexpected joy.

“But we didn’t know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we’d grown up with.”

Louis makes this distinction between the relationships he had when he was a younger man and the relationship he has with Addie as an older man. Some of the mistakes he and his wife Diane made earlier were based on lessons they had learned from their own parents or ideas they had somehow picked up along over the years. Now, however, Addie and Louis bring more experience, wisdom, and self-knowledge to their relationship.

“Children can accept and adjust to almost anything, if it’s done right.”

Ruth comments to Addie that she knows Louis still visits her house at night, even with Jamie there. However, she is not worried that any possible romance between Louis and Addie may disturb Jamie because she trusts that Addie and Louis know what they’re doing and have the boy’s best interests in mind.

“Here’s a kid that’s spent his first fifteen years learning how to drive a tractor and drill wheat and grease a combine and now somebody arbitrarily makes him say a poem out loud in front of other boys and girls who’ve been raising wheat and driving tractors and feeding hogs and now to pass and get out of English class he’s got to recite ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and actually say the word loveliest out loud.”

Louis explains to Addie why he feels like he was only ever just a mediocre English teacher and that his efforts to convey the passion and beauty of poetry were often pointless because his students weren’t interested in the material. Combined with this feeling is the fact that he didn’t want to be a high school English teacher at all, but a poet. Teaching, however, was a reliable, steady income that he needed to support his family.

“So life hasn’t turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected, he said.”

While learning about each other through their nighttime talks, Louis realizes that neither he nor Addie was particularly happy or fulfilled. They may, in fact, not have fully realized this about themselves until their discussions. Also, the enjoyment they have now with each other in the present serves to highlight their earlier unhappiness.

“I quit trying to fix things and we settled into our long polite and quiet life.”

After her daughter Connie’s death, Addie’s family life crumbles into coldness. Neither her son nor her husband engage with her attempts to have meaningful conversations. She tries to reach her son through arranging activities she can do with him and reaches out to her husband romantically, but they both shut her out and she eventually gives up.

“We had that long time of joined life, even if it wasn’t good for either one of us. That was our history.”

Though Addie was lonely in her home life after Connie died, she remained dutiful to her husband and son. Carl, too, would tend to her when she was ill out of a sense of duty, but there was no real affection between them.

“I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.”

When Addie and Louis discuss their spiritual beliefs, Louis says he thinks they are spirits temporarily in the physical world. Addie points out that the physical world has a lot of life and joy to offer, so she’s not ready yet to say goodbye to it.

“Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out of old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.”

Louis feels that he failed Diane as a husband because she didn’t get what she wanted out of life and their marriage. Addie makes the above statement, telling him that he’s being too hard on himself since it is often difficult for people with different goals and motivations to truly understand one another and make each other happy. She implies that Louis was probably as unhappy in the marriage as Diane was, and she knows that she and Carl were an unhappy married couple, too.

“But even now I can see it all clearly and feel that kind of otherworldliness, the sense of moving in a dream and making decisions that you didn’t know you had to make, or if you were sure of what you were saying.”

Addie reflects on the time immediately after Carl suddenly collapsed in church and died. She had to make arrangements for the funeral and also care for Gene, all while dealing with the shock of Carl’s death. A similar trance-like state came over Addie after Connie’s death.

“You can’t fix things, can you, Louis said. We always want to. But we can’t.”

One bit of wisdom Louis and Addie have gained over their lives is that it is hard, if not impossible, to fix other people, and this includes people they care about deeply, like their children. Addie tried to fix Gene’s sorrow and guilt when he was younger, but to no avail. She still wants to fix things for Gene because of Jamie, but she has limited power to do so. Louis, too, worries that he hurt his daughter Holly deeply when he left the family briefly to go live with Tamara, and that Holly’s insecurities manifest themselves in her romantic relationships with men. However, though he observes this, he knows he doesn’t have the power to fix it.

“I just want to live simply and pay attention to what’s happening each day. And come sleep with you at night.”

Louis’s ambitions have changed from when he was a younger man. He no longer aspires to be a successful poet, or to write poetry at all. He has found new value in the simple pleasures of life with Addie.

“You don’t understand yet, do you. I don’t want to be alone and brood like you do working things out by myself. I want you to come over so I can talk to you.”

Addie scolds Louis for his reluctance to visit her after Jamie leaves. He worries that she may be emotionally vulnerable and want space, but she reminds him that her loneliness has often been caused by people staying away when she is sad. She wants his company so she can share her grief with him.

“After Jamie had left they tried to do what the town thought all along they’d been doing but hadn’t.”

Everyone in Holt, as well as family outside of it, think that Louis and Addie have been having sex though they had only been talking to one another at night. However, after Jamie leaves, they decide to give physical intimacy a try. Their abstinence to this point indicates two things: One, they have been careful around Jamie, and two, the physical part of a romantic relationship is less important to them now than their emotional closeness.

“You’re not even ashamed of yourselves.”

Gene says this to Addie and Louis, demanding that they stop seeing each other. He thinks they’re somehow harming Jamie and that Louis is after Addie’s money. In truth, he is after his mother’s money and he is the one hurting Jamie through his fraught relationship with Jamie’s mother, but Gene does not have much self-awareness.

“They still held each other in the night when he did come over but it was more out of habit and desolation and anticipated loneliness and disheartenment, as if they were trying to store up these moments together against what was coming.”

After giving in to Gene’s demands that they stop seeing each other, Louis and Addie have one last night together. They have already stopped making love since the relationship has lost its joy. They expect that their loneliness in the future will be worse than it was before they started, since they have been so happy together.

“I can’t have you walking by and my thinking that you are. Or wondering if you are. I can’t be imagining you’re out in front of the house. I have to be physically shut off from you now.”

Addie tells Louis to stop walking by her house at night, partly because other people might see him, think they’re still visiting each other, and report back to Gene—but mostly because she, too, is having a difficult time being separated from Louis. If she finds herself wondering if he’s out there or if she can see him, it will be that much more difficult for her to survive their separation.

“It’s just two old people talking in the dark, Addie said.”

Louis jokes that Addie’s forbidden phone calls to him are like phone sex, but this is her answer. This simple sentence is the basis of the entire novel, and it implies connection, meaning, and love between two older people who had been lonely before and had given up on finding happiness.