Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

I simply fail to see how the act of legally formalizing a human relationship necessitates friends, family and co-workers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them.

Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something unflattering?

As if a silver in the egg-and-spoon race was some sort of compensation for not understanding how to use an apostrophe.

She wasn’t actually chewing gum, but her demeanour was very much that of a gum chewer.

‘No thank you,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to accept a drink from you, because then I would be obliged to purchase one for you in return, and I’m afraid I’m simply not interested in spending two drinks’ worth of time with you.’

Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.

The crematorium was a busy place and the parking spaces were needed, I supposed. I’m not sure I’d like to be burned. I think I might like to be fed to zoo animals. It would be both environmentally friendly and a lovely treat for the larger carnivores.

Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.

but it didn’t hurt – like noticing you had a stone in your shoe, but while you were sitting down rather than walking on it.

They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.

I wondered if that’s what it would be like in a family – if you had parents, or a sister, say, who would be there, no matter what. It wasn’t that you could take them for granted, as such – heaven knows, nothing can be taken for granted in this life – it was simply that you would know, almost unthinkingly, that they’d be there if you needed them, no matter how bad things got.

I know she’s only a cat. But it’s still love; animals, people. It’s unconditional, and it’s both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world.

Your voice changes when you’re smiling, it alters the sound somehow.