Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

else. As soon as I heard her voice, I felt that familiar, creeping dread. I’d been so looking forward to sharing my news, dropping it at her feet like a dog retrieving a game bird peppered with shot. Now I couldn’t shake the thought that she would pick it up and, with brutal calm, simply tear it to shreds.

I needed to polish and perfect things before I plucked up the courage to share my shiny new jewel with her, set it before her for her approval. In the meantime, let me get away, let this end, please.

inveigled

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.

“You don’t look like a social worker,” I said. She stared at me but said nothing. Not again! In every walk of life, I encounter people with underdeveloped social skills with alarming frequency. Why is it that client-facing jobs hold such allure for misanthropes? It’s a conundrum.

hoi polloi.

I’ve looked after her, tended to her, picked her up and repotted her when she was dropped or thrown. She likes light, and she’s thirsty. Apart from that, she requires minimal care and attention, and largely looks after herself. I talk to her sometimes, I’m not ashamed to admit it. When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.

the done thing

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.

harridan’s

Wordsworth Lane, Shelley Close, Keats Rise—no

Dante Lane or Poe Crescent.

bonhomie.

descant

lily-livered,

callow

hamartia,

ken,

Thomas Hardy

soigné

de trop.

bibelots

sybarite.

scansion

Mirabile dictu,

vol-au-vents,

Emily Brontë

febrile

micturate

desultory

badinage,

bichon frise

Please God, let her have been spared that. Trying to live on afterward, trying to manage the guilt and the pain and the horror of it all . . . I would not wish that on another human being. I would happily assume her burden if I could. I’d barely notice it, I’m sure, on top of my own.

patina

ten denier

blown roses.

raison d’être.

prurience

inured

morris dancing.

aberrant

bluebottles

They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.

augured

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.

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.

simian.

Hen dos.

rhotic

bon mots.