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What it argues
Eleanor Oliphant is twenty-nine years old, works in a Glasgow office doing data entry, and has not had a proper conversation with anyone outside of work in years. She eats the same meals on the same days, does not drink on weekdays, and is absolutely certain she is completely fine. She has significant scars on her face and arms, she speaks with an eccentric formality that alienates almost everyone, and she has a weekly phone call with her mother that is the most disturbing thing in the novel for reasons that take time to become clear.
The book is a character study masquerading as a feel-good novel, or perhaps the other way around. Eleanor's voice is funny and odd and frequently astute about the social conventions she refuses to perform, and the humor is real. But beneath it, Honeyman is working with severe childhood trauma, and as the novel progresses and Eleanor forms her first tentative friendships — with a coworker, with an old man they help in the street, with a therapist — the damage begins to surface. The book earns its ending rather than giving it away early.
What it gets right
- 1.
Eleanor's cheerful certainty that she is fine is the novel's central irony — and also a very accurate portrait of how dissociation and repression actually work in people who have survived severe trauma.
- 2.
The voice is the achievement: funny, precise, socially oblivious in ways that are both comic and heartbreaking, and credible as the voice of someone who learned to think very carefully to survive a chaotic childhood.
- 3.
The novel treats loneliness as a structural problem, not a personal failing — Eleanor is isolated partly by her damage and partly by a culture that has no mechanisms for people who don't fit its social templates.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Gail Honeyman is a Scottish writer born in 1972. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is her debut novel, published in 2017. It was a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection, and was translated into more than forty languages. Honeyman worked in the arts and in management consulting before writing fiction full-time. She has spoken about drawing on observations of loneliness and social isolation in modern urban life, and about her interest in how survivors of childhood trauma adapt their behavior and perception to protect themselves.
