Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

I saw him bend down to light the cigarette of a woman in a wheelchair—she’d brought her drip out with her, on wheels, so that she could destroy her health at the same time as taxpayers’ money was being used to try and restore it.

As I’d expected, he was semiliterate.

It was, I thought, the sound of madness, the kind of music that lunatics hear in their heads just before they slice the heads off foxes and throw them into their neighbor’s back garden.

suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change.

could see no reason against it but for the small-minded anti-feline contingent who might complain.

underneath it all, like an embryo forming—tiny, so tiny, barely a cluster of cells, the heartbeat as small as the head of a pin, there I was. Eleanor Oliphant.