Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine. She has a stable job and then treats herself to pizza and a bottle of vodka on the weekends. She lives alone and has no friends, but that doesn’t mean her life is bad. She’s fine.
Except maybe she isn’t.
This book caught me off guard. I had heard so many people talking about it and it was listed on so many book club lists, but I wasn’t expecting to love it as much as I did.
I listened to the audio version from Penguin Random House, narrated by Cathleen McCarron and I think this truly enhanced my experience. McCarron did an amazing job with different characters’ voices so it actually sounded like a new person speaking. But also, McCarron was spot on with her tone when delivering Eleanor Oliphant’s one-liners and her socially-inept and truly heart wrenching moments.
Gail Honeyman wrote this novel with a perfect balance of sad and humorous scenes. She took a serious and difficult issue and somehow made it warm and funny, while still showing the severity and sadness of depression and loneliness. It was a book filled with emotion without making it overly-sentimental and made me laugh and cry with it’s perfect moments.
Eleanor Oliphant is also a fantastically written character. She is socially clueless and literal to a degree that most people find odd. Some of her moments are cringe worthy, but also endearing. You see how her past truly shaped her into this socially inept woman and cannot help but sympathize with her oddness.
I was worried at one point that is was going to become a romance novel. One of those novels where the main character is trying to find happiness and can only find it when falling in love with another. But thankfully, although there are hints that maybe a relationship will ultimately come about in the distant future, this book is all about Eleanor and her true struggle of realizing her life may not be the best it can be. And thus, she starts to learn how to truly be happy.
Synopsis: Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live. Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she's avoided all her life. Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than. . . fine?