Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

A human hand was exactly the right weight, exactly the right temperature for touching another person, I realized.

I felt like a newly laid egg, all swishy and gloopy inside, and so fragile that the slightest pressure could break me.

and the funeral service was there in my mind, 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.

Tiny slivers of life—they all added up and helped you to feel that you too could be a fragment, a little piece of humanity who usefully filled a space, however minuscule.

when you took a moment to see what was around you, noticed all the little things, it made you feel . . . lighter.

A woman who knew her own mind and scorned the conventions of polite society. We were going to get along just fine.

When you’re struggling hard to manage your own emotions, it becomes unbearable to have to witness other people’s, to have to try and manage theirs too.

Everything was there, obvious to us both, but it all remained unsaid. Sometimes that was best.

I looked away when I’d finished, knowing that Raymond’s face would be expressing emotions that I wasn’t quite ready to relive yet while he processed this information.

This part of the city was aggressively gray, but green life still struggled into being: moss on walls, weeds in guttering, the occasional forlorn tree. I have always lived in urban areas, but I feel the need for green as a visceral longing.

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

“I survived, Raymond!” I said, knowing that I was both lucky and unlucky, and grateful for it.