Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar.

I simply fail to see how the act of legally formalizing a human relationship necessitates friends, family and coworkers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them.

It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.

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.

Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways?

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.

I was a thirty-year-old woman with a juvenile crush on a man whom I didn’t know, and would never know. I had convinced myself that he was the one, that he would help to make me normal, fix the things that were wrong with my life.

If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.

when you took a moment to see what was around you, noticed all the little things, it made you feel . . . lighter.

The voice in my own head—my own voice—was actually quite sensible, and rational, I’d begun to realize. It was Mummy’s voice that had done all the judging, and encouraged me to do so too. 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.