Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

Jane Eyre. A strange child, difficult to love. A lonely only child. She’s left to deal with so much pain at such a young age—the aftermath of death, the absence of love. It’s Mr. Rochester who gets burned in the end. I know how that feels. All of it.

I looked at myself again. I was healthy and my body was strong. I had a brain that worked fine, and a voice, albeit an unmelodious one; smoke inhalation all those years ago had damaged my vocal cords irreparably. I had hair, ears, eyes and a mouth. I was a human woman, no more and no less.

My life, I realized, had gone wrong. Very, very wrong. I wasn’t supposed to live like this. No one was supposed to live like this. The problem was that I simply didn’t know how to make it right. Mummy’s way was wrong, I knew that. But no one had ever shown me the right way to live a life, and although I’d tried my best over the years, I simply didn’t know how to make things better. I could not solve the puzzle of me.

Obscenity is the distinguishing hallmark of a sadly limited vocabulary.