The essence of the stories in Strout's Olive, Again

In essence, all (so far) of the stories in Elizabeth Strout's collection, Olive, Again (2019), are about lives of people living with terrible secrets and with guilt, lives seemingly pleasant and calm but, internally, her characters are living with tempestuous thoughts and memories: marital affairs of course, but also sexual abuse, guilt over the childhood mistake that led to the accidental death of the father, sex discrimination (#metoo), repressed yet thinly disguised hatred and prejudice, and the list could go on. Making matters worse, all of this plays out in a small town, where the secrets keep getting unearthed as old antagonists are frequently crossing paths. Some try to escape this small coastal town (the fictional Cosby, Maine - do I have the name right? If so, what an odd coincidence!), generally by moving to "the city," either Boston or New York - but the people are drawn back to their home town for one reason or another - sometimes on a fateful visit to family, in which the fissures and faults will be revealed, sometimes on business or wrapping up a family estate, sometimes in retreat from the pressures of urban life - and often the characters have regrets about the life path they avoided: city dwellers think of returning to Maine (one of the stories follows up not on the eponymous Olive but on the Burgess Boys, from another Strout work, one of whom left home and one who stayed), those who stayed resent the (financial) success of those who left. Most, maybe all, of these stories involve a scene of confession or a moment of epiphany, in which the characters unearth buried guilt or sorrow or in which they come to a realization about the course of their lives. Overall, it's a powerful collection - although my quibble would be that many of these stories involve extensive dialogue, much like a one-act play, and we rarely get much of a sense of place or of interior lives - though I concede that the use of dialog rather than other narrative devices - symbolism, dreams, interior monologue, omniscience - makes these stories quite accessible.