Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

Mummy wouldn’t be able to advise. She doesn’t get to decide what she eats.

I feel sorry for beautiful people. Beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral.

in hospital waiting rooms and other institutional settings.

It’s quite frightening to think about the ideas that I may have absorbed from Mummy.

I mean, really. Was all of me on show in buff folders, splayed wide for anyone to flick open and do with as they wished?

It was one of the innumerable ways in which my old life and my new life differed. Before and after the fire.

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.

and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics.

Everything seems worse in the darkest hours of the night;

The things I’ve seen cannot be unseen. The things I’ve done cannot be undone.

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? These were, of course, rhetorical questions.

“Listen—d’you fancy coming with me?” Raymond said, just as I was turning toward the gate. Under no circumstances, was my immediate thought.

there was a large calendar with a lurid photograph of two kittens in a basket,

But would it be better if he were by my side? I suspected that it would, not least because he could always fill a silence with banal, inane comments and questions should the need arise.

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.

I like to read as widely as possible for many reasons, not least in order to broaden my vocabulary to assist with crossword solving.

there is a power in naming things, and I wasn’t quite ready to cede it to her yet, to hear those precious syllables rolled in her mouth, for her to spit them out again.

Childish, I know, but Mummy does tend to bring out the worst in me.

I noticed it because the answer to twelve across in yesterday’s crossword had been Shinkansen. Such small coincidences can pepper a life with interest.

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

bright as a knife.

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

it’s impossible to sing when you’re crying—there’s a lump like a plum stone lodged in your throat, and the music can’t get past it.

Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.

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 wasn’t good at pretending, that was the thing.

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

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

I felt a hot flush streak right up the front of my body and then down my back, a sensation I can only liken to being given a sedative prior to a general anesthetic. My pulse was pounding.

Be patient, Marianne. I’m coming.

he repeated, sounding firm but bored, as people in uniform are often wont to do.

My password? Of course. Three words, Ignis aurum probat. “Fire tests gold.” The rest of the phrase: “. . . and adversity tests the brave.”