Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

although the designers are desperate to be seen as freethinkers with unique ideas, they all adhere to a strict uniform.

Even alcoholics deserve help, I suppose, although they should get drunk at home, like I do, so that they don’t cause anyone else any trouble. But then, not everyone is as sensible and considerate as me.

Mummy always said that an obsession with home interiors was tediously bourgeois and, worse still, that any kind of “do-it-yourself” activities were very much the preserve of the hoi polloi. It’s quite frightening to think about the ideas that I may have absorbed from Mummy.

Human mating rituals are unbelievably tedious to observe. At least in the animal kingdom you are occasionally treated to a flash of bright feathers or a display of spectacular violence. Hair flicking and play fights don’t quite cut the mustard.

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.

I have often noticed that people who routinely wear sportswear are the least likely sort to participate in athletic activity.

I’ve noticed that most Scottish people don’t inquire beyond “down south,” and I can only assume that this description encapsulates some sort of generic Englandshire for them, boat races and bowler hats, as though Liverpool and Cornwall were the same sorts of places, inhabited by the same sorts of people. Conversely, they are always adamant that every part of their own country is unique and special.

“He had a heart attack not long after I started uni,” he explained to me. “Never got to enjoy his retirement,” his mother said. “It often happens that way.”

She was, quite simply, a nice lady who’d raised a family and now lived quietly with her cats and grew vegetables. This was both nothing and everything.

My nails are always clean—clean nails, like clean shoes, are fundamental to self-respect. Whilst I am neither stylish nor fashionable, I am always clean; that way, at least, I can hold my head up when I take my place, however unexalted, in the world.

Sometimes, when you tried to help with suggestions, it could lead to misunderstandings, not all of them entirely pleasant.

Moments later, I received a response: Twenty-first-century communication. I fear for our nation’s standards of literacy.

The man who had served us was lounging at the counter, nodding his head in time with the music. It was a cacophonous din, with too many guitars and not enough melody. 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.

I’ve found this to be a very effective way of passing the time; you take a situation or a person and start to imagine nice things that might happen. You can make anything happen, anything at all, inside a daydream.

if in doubt, smile,

I wasn’t made for illiteracy; it simply didn’t come naturally. Although it’s good to try new things and to keep an open mind, it’s also extremely important to stay true to who you really are. I read that in a magazine at the hairdressers.

Social interaction, it appeared, was surprisingly expensive—the travel, the clothes, the drinks, the lunches, the gifts. Sometimes it evened out in the end—like with the drinks—but, I was finding out, more often than not, one incurred a net financial loss.

Everything took so long. Before, I’d simply bathed, run a comb through my hair and pulled on my trousers. Being feminine apparently meant taking an eternity to do anything, and involved quite a bit of advanced planning.

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. Could you request that? I wondered. I made a mental note to write to the WWF in order to find out.

It takes a long time to learn to live with loss, assuming you ever manage it. After all these years, I’m still something of a work in progress in that regard.

I had, literally, nothing left to lose. But, by careful observation from the sidelines, I’d worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little.

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

Once you get used to being on your own, it becomes normal.

These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.

Was I alive? I hoped so, but only because if this was the location of the afterlife, I’d be lodging an appeal immediately.

Another bad sign—someone or something had turned vodka into water. This was not my preferred kind of miracle.

“It’s SpongeBob, Eleanor,” he said, speaking very slowly and clearly as though I were some sort of idiot. “SpongeBob SquarePants?” A semi-human bath sponge with protruding front teeth! On sale as if it were something completely unremarkable! For my entire life, people have said that I’m strange, but really, when I see things like this, I realize that I’m actually relatively normal.

She smiled at me. Her teeth! Oh, Ms. Temple. She had done her best, but nothing could change the size of them, I supposed. They belonged in a far bigger mouth, perhaps not even a human one.

Noticing details, that was good. 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.

Obscenity is the distinguishing hallmark of a sadly limited vocabulary.

“Thank you,” I said. He nodded, his back still turned. Everything was there, obvious to us both, but it all remained unsaid. Sometimes that was best.

This is what I felt: the warm weight of his hands on me; the genuineness in his smile; the gentle heat of something opening, the way some flowers spread out in the morning at the sight of the sun. I knew what was happening. It was the unscarred piece of my heart. It was just big enough to let in a bit of affection. There was still a tiny bit of room left.

I could tell he was being genuine because of all the warmth that was coming down the phone. Your voice changes when you’re smiling, it alters the sound somehow.

Ignis aurum probat. “Fire tests gold.” The rest of the phrase: “. . . and adversity tests the brave.”