Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman - Review

385 pages

Book Club Read

Blurb

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life.

She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.

Eleanor Oliphant is happy.

Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled existence. Except, sometimes, everything…

Review

I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is a poignant, funny, touching, sad, and thought-provoking story about a thirty-year old woman rebuilding her life literally on ashes. Not so much on the ashes of her old life, but on the ashes of everything she’d been able to hide from for twenty years.

When the book starts Eleanor is basically a recluse with a job. From Monday to Friday she works, always wearing the same clothes, always eating the same lunch, and never interacting with her colleagues of whom she despairs. Her journey into the world—and ultimately to herself—is mostly accidental and gentle. I loved that the author avoided what could have been big, shocking scenes, instead describing Eleanor’s awakening, break-down, and subsequent recovery as the result of small steps. It is because her journey is based on events that to most of us appear almost insignificant that it gets its poignancy. Her story wouldn’t have been anywhere near as touching if it had included big, disastrous, events.

Of course, the whole story does centre on one, big, and disastrous event, but even that, when at last it does get spoken about, is presented in a quiet, almost distant way. Because, by the time Eleanor is ready to face the truth about her past, her life, and herself, what she recalls is no longer a shock to her, or to the reader. The moment is powerful and emotional, but anything but over the top.

It’s funny how we can often see the world we live in better, or more clearly through the eyes of those who stand in that world in a (somewhat) different way than we do ourselves. Eleanor has a brutal honesty when it comes to the people around them. She judges them on how they look, what they wear, their eating habits, and basically every other characteristic, without ever taking into account that she herself doesn’t care how she looks, what she wears, and how she comes across when the book starts. In fact, when the story first started I wondered if Eleanor might be on the Autism spectrum. In the end I had to conclude that she was not. That with her it was a case of her mind working that way not because she is wired that way but because it was the only way it could protect Eleanor from the facts she wasn’t ready to deal with yet.

I honestly thought I had it all figured out from early on and was very happily surprised that Eleanor and her creator still managed to surprise…shock me. No, of course I’m not going to tell you why; every reader deserves to be surprised—or shocked—for themselves.

I loved the way the book ended, with hope, but without a clear-cut or rushed and forced outcome. Again the author avoided what to others might have been an obvious easy way toward a happy ending, and made it all the more powerful because of that. It’s nice to be able to imagine how Eleanor and Raymond might continue to develop, without having the answers presented on a silver platter.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is the story of a woman finding her way to who she actually is after twenty years of hiding from her past and from herself. It is an emotional and hard-hitting story, told in the most gentle of ways, and as such, it is a memorable and rather special book.