Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

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.

Greeting cards are preposterously expensive, given that they are fabricated from a small piece of printed cardboard. You get an envelope with it, I suppose, but still.

Absolutely agree

The third, in the manner of Goldilocks, was just right—around my age, well groomed, sensible-looking.

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.

Twenty-first-century communication. I fear for our nation’s standards of literacy.

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.

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

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.

“Jesus Christ!” a man’s voice said. “Eleanor Oliphant,” I replied.

“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.

(a vase of roses, made using a computer by someone who was dead inside)

“Yes, I suppose you would have remembered an Oliphant in the room,” I said.

Obscenity is the distinguishing hallmark of a sadly limited vocabulary.

He passed me his jacket and I looked at it for a moment before realizing I was supposed to hang it up. I didn’t have anywhere suitable, so I folded it into a square as best I could and then put it on the floor in the corner of the hall.

HILARIOUS