Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

Once again, for some reason, it is I who am considered strange. But if you’re going to drink a cup of tea, why not take every care to maximize the pleasure?

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?

There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.

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

Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there’s something very liberating about it; once you realize that you don’t need anyone, you can take care of yourself. That’s the thing: it’s best just to take care of yourself. You can’t protect other people, however hard you try. You try, and you fail, and your world collapses around you, burns down to ashes.

I was happy being alone. Eleanor Oliphant, sole survivor—that’s me.

She didn’t look at me directly, but into the mirror, where she addressed my reflection; I found myself doing the same. It was strangely relaxing.

Thoughts of this type—vague, mysterious, unsettling—were precisely the sort that vodka was good for obliterating, but unfortunately I’d only been offered a choice of tea or coffee. I wondered why hair salons didn’t provide anything stronger.

She had tried to steer me toward vertiginous heels again—why are these people so incredibly keen on crippling their female customers? I began to wonder if cobblers and chiropractors had established some fiendish cartel.

There was, it seemed, no Eleanor-shaped social hole for me to slot into.

Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don’t find very funny, do things they don’t particularly want to, with people whose company they don’t particularly enjoy. Not me. I had decided, years ago, that if the choice was between that or flying solo, then I’d fly solo. It was safer that way. Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.

It is incomprehensible to me now that I could ever have thought that anyone would love this ambulant bag of blood and bones.

I was Eleanor, sad little Eleanor Oliphant, with my pathetic job, my vodka and my dinners for one, and I always would be.

was curious about something. What, I wondered, was the point of me? I contributed nothing to the world, absolutely nothing, and I took nothing from it either. When I ceased to exist, it would make no material difference to anyone.

I have been waiting for death all my life. I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive.

There was no living thing in the universe that was more alone than me. Or more terrible.

I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person’s hand holding mine. There have been times when I felt that I might die of loneliness.

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.

There’s nothing wrong with being overweight, is there? They could be eating because they’re sad, the same way you used to drink vodka.

I was getting to quite like my own voice, my own thoughts. I wanted more of them. They made me feel good, calm even. They made me feel like me.

It’s safe to say that Eleanor Oliphant’s name will never appear in lights, and nor would I want it to. I’m happiest in the background, being left to my own devices.

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