Book Review

Guest Review: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

We have a guest review from Lara! Thanks so much, Lara!

Lara is a teacher, feminist, knitter and proud co-parent to the greatest three-legged black cat in the southern hemisphere.

CW: There are discussions of child abuse and neglect in this novel. There is also a suicide attempt in the novel.

The title is a lie, or rather, it is the lie that Eleanor tells herself. She has retreated (understandably) into a rigid routine of evenings with The Archers and weekends of vodka.

With 4.6 stars on Amazon, 4.3 stars on GoodReads, and numerous awards, I went into this book with high expectations. Specifically, I began this book expecting to laugh. Reese Witherspoon herself told me that it was “beautifully written and incredibly funny”. Instead I got something very different from it. I don’t think I laughed once, not even a little bit, with the notable exception of the glorious relationship between Eleanor and her cat, Glen. Feast your eyes upon this bit of cat lady glory, when Eleanor first meets Glen.

The cat squirmed in my arms and landed on the carpet with a heavy thump. She strolled over to the litter tray, squatted down and urinated loudly, maintaining extremely assertive eye contact with me throughout. After the deluge, she lazily kicked over the traces with her back legs, scattering litter all over my freshly cleaned floor. A woman who knew her own mind and scorned the conventions of polite society. We were going to get along just fine.

In her words, Eleanor “works in an office” – a vague response that ensures small talk is limited. Her boss, the hapless Bob, is a good egg, if not altogether successful. Her colleagues are a collection of rotters – ordinary people choosing to be unkind, or rather, not taking the time to be kind. Eleanor is weird and a joke to them. Eleanor overhears these conversations altogether too often:

‘She’s mental,” he said.

‘Well, we know she’s mental,’ Janey said, ‘that was never in doubt. The question is, what did she do this time?’

Billy snorted. ‘You know she won those tickets and asked me to go to that stupid gig with her?’

Janey smiled. ‘Bob’s annual raffle prize of crap client freebies. First prize, two free tickets. Second prize, four free tickets…’

Billy sighed. ‘Exactly. Total embarrassment of a Thursday night out – a charity gig in a pub, starring the marketing team of our biggest client, plus various cringeworthy party pieces from all their friends and family? And, to make it worse, with her?’

Everyone laughed. I couldn’t disagree with his assessment; it was hardly a Gatsbyesque night of glamour and excess.

It is at this charity gig that Eleanor sees Johnny Rocks perform. She begins to make over herself, starting with her pubic hair and culminating in new clothes, all with the express purpose of making Johnny realise that she is the woman of his dreams.

At the same time, Eleanor gains a new colleague in the IT department, Raymond Gibbons, and Eleanor’s description of him is unflinching:

He was barely taller than me, and was wearing green training shoes, ill-fitting denim trousers and a T-shirt showing a cartoon dog, lying on top of its kennel. It was stretched taut against a burgeoning belly. He had pale sandy hair, cut short in an attempt to hide the fact that it was thinning and receding, and patchy blonde stubble. All of his visible skin, both face and body, was very pink. A word sprang to mind: porcine.

A chance encounter in the street with Raymond and an elderly man brings Raymond into Eleanor’s orbit. This encounter brings the total number of Eleanor’s friends to two. Like a snowball on its journey, Eleanor gathers friends. Each new friend, or even act of kindness, startles Eleanor. Her response to the flowers her boss sends her when when her doctor restricts her from work due to illness is just such an occasion:

A tiny envelope, like a hamster’s birthday card, was affixed to the cellophane. Inside, a business card – plain white – bore the following message:

Get well soon, Eleanor – we are all thinking of you. Love and best wishes from Bob and everyone at by Design xxx

I took the basket into the kitchen and put it on the table. Thinking of me. The scent of a summer garden, sweet and heady, was released when I removed the cellophane. They’d been thinking. Of me! I sat down and stroked the petals of a red gerbera, and I smiled.

Eleanor is on the autism spectrum and so many of the things she says, notices, and comments on startle her colleagues. They laugh, and while I can see that these declarations are funny, Eleanor’s vulnerability curtailed my laughter. Eleanor was very real to me. She was a full, rounded character with thoughts and feelings, a soul and a heart. I couldn’t laugh because her vulnerability was so obvious. Or, perhaps, her vulnerability spoke to my vulnerability, making humour only a distant possibility.

This vulnerability can be best described by an illustration I saw many years ago by Maira Kalman. In it, she examines the tremendous frailty (in this case of the elderly) and the bravery it takes to continue putting oneself out there. This resilient vulnerability is what I relished in Eleanor’s story. How transcendently beautiful it is when people let their beating hearts show!

Eleanor thinks she is protecting herself. She thinks of herself as invulnerable. To me, as the reader, it was clear that that was a convenient self-delusion; this binge-drinking social pariah was indeed vulnerable. For me, this is the most beautiful part of the novel, that Eleanor lets her heart out of the box she’s kept it in.

While this book didn’t make me laugh, it did give strength and succour to that little voice that tells me that things will be okay. No one is beyond redemption. Even Eleanor – who has resolutely avoided life – can find her way into life, messy as it is.

For Eleanor, this means leaving the rigid structure she has built around herself and engaging in what she calls “social integration” even though she is terrified and feels lost. It also means addressing the past that she has so vociferously repressed, with each painful memory ultimately breaking the ties that bind her. This is a novel with heart, in all the ways that matter. Without a single cliché, twee moment, or melodramatic declaration, this book made me feel like maybe we will be okay, as individuals and as a society. The initial flavour of this book might be a kind of sadness, but the aftertaste is one of joyful, resilient hope.

It is this initial sadness though, that makes it a B+ for me. Perhaps it is a case of unrealistic expectations on my part, but I thought I would laugh and feel joy, instead I walked alongside a character as she went through her ‘dark night of the soul’. While it is a beautiful book and I am glad I read it, I do not want to read it again – the emotions are just too real and too intense for me.

Bitchery, have I missed the mark (literally and figuratively) with this book? Have you read it? Should I have found humour in it? I need to talk more about this book; it just won’t leave me, even all these weeks after finishing it!

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Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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  1. Claire says:

    I read this book at my library, filed in the romance section, but I really think it should be filed under drama, with romantic elements. You’re right that the book is well written and characterised, but by the end I didn’t even want a HEA or even HFN for the romance, I just wanted a happy-for-Eleanor ending, and while the author managed to create character growth I just thought there was so many places she could have taken the ending to be much more truely real-humanly satisfying that the actual end of the story felt like a cheap cop-out. I ended up wanting to have been able to nag the editor’s ear for a rewrite of the ending, and that feeling took a significant chunk off my Goodreads rating.

  2. GHN says:

    Hmmm. A heroine on the Spectrum – like myself. I think I need this book.

  3. SusanH says:

    Like the reviewer, I went into this book expecting a comedy and was completely thrown by how emotional and sad it was. I really didn’t like the novel, but it did stay with me. If I had known what to expect, my reading experience might have been different.

  4. Rebecca says:

    I was not amused at all. I had heard so many people talk about how funny it was that by the time I read it, My reaction was horror. I couldn’t imagine why people thought this woman’s bleak sad life was funny. Her problem drinking is so serious. What’s funny about it? It was nice that she finally made some friends but it was like a cherry on a shit sundae.

  5. Shana says:

    I loved this book, to the point that I was annoying friends and telling them they should read it. I picked it up on a whim, and found it witty and wry but not laugh out loud funny. I didn’t know it was supposed to be funny though, and if I had I think I would have been disappointed. Although the scene where Eleanor tells a spa exactly what she thinks of women waxing their public hair off was hilarious wish fulfillment for me. I enjoy prickly and uncompromising heroines and stories about people creating lives for themselves after trauma so that was part of the appeal.

    The part I didn’t like about the book was the fat shaming. Eleanor is very fatphobic, and while it’s presented as one of her strongly held beliefs that is rooted in her childhood and the result of limited experience, it was still very difficult to read, as a fat woman. She gets better, but I wished the author would have had her assumptioms about fat people more directly challenged in the story. I worry that for some readers, Eleanor’s open disdain for fatness allowed a kind of wish fulfillment of hatred they wish they could say out loud.

  6. Charlie says:

    I loved this book. It did make me laugh at times but then I would be cringing then scared then sad then smiling. It’s not a comedic book and not laugh out loud and it is definitely not a romance but it was engaging and watching Eleanor blossom did give me hope.

  7. CelineB says:

    I had kind of a strange reaction to this book. As I was reading this I loved it. I stayed up too late reading it the day I started it then ignored everything to finish it the next day. It left me with the feeling that it was great. However, the more I thought about it, the more I questioned what the book is trying to say. Initially it felt very aspirational, this is the way the world as it should be. We should reach out to people who are lonely and different and make them happier. Basically it came across as a novel version of the song “You Will Be Found” from Dear Evan Hansen. This is pure fantasy and doesn’t happen in the real world.

    The problem is, looking back, the book does hint at the way loneliness and different people are actually treated. In the real world lonely people are treated like crap. The book says this, “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.” As someone who’s dealt with loneliness a good portion of my life, I know this is true. Tell most people you’re lonely and they get annoyed with or disgusted by you. Also Eleanor only really starts being accepted by people at work when she changes her appearance and starts dressing in a more socially acceptable way. This is all very realistic to the way different and lonely people are treated in society, but not something I want to happen in a idealistic version of the way the world should work.

    My main problem was I felt like the tone of the book is uneven. Does it actually want to address the problems of loneliness in our society and issues the reality of it or does it just want to create superficial inspiration-porn where we feel happy about the ultimate goodness of humankind? If it’s the latter, I don’t think Eleanor should have had to change her appearance and I don’t think the quote about how lonely people are treated belong in the book. It’s too cynical for the rest of the tone. If the book wants to deal with the reality of loneliness and how to fix the problem, it needed to go a lot deeper than it did and really look at societal attitudes. How much should Eleanor be expected to change to fit in and how much should we as a society strive to be like Raymond and reach out to try to include her as she is?

    Maybe I’m just thinking about it too much.

  8. Darlynne says:

    Our book club chose this book and my reaction was exactly yours, Lara. I was horrified at so many things, at the same time I was rooting for Eleanor the whole time. There were funny elements for sure, but if the expectation going in is primarily comedy, this is not that book. Beautifully written, exquisite in many ways, hopeful and totally heartbreaking.

  9. Becky says:

    I agree with the reviewer. I found the book to be haunting, as it stayed with me for weeks. I, too, went in thinking it’d be funnier and more romance-y, but instead it was so heartbreaking and hard to read at first. I don’t think I’d re-read, and only recommend with a few warnings. It could be, like another comment said, that it just wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

  10. Frida says:

    I also had a very strange reaction to this book. While I enjoyed parts of it and admired Honeyman’s writing I also felt uncomfortable with how Eleanor was portrayed.

    I don’t think the intent of the author should matter but Honeyman said in an interview that Eleanor isn’t on the spectrum at all (that “it’s all nurture, not nature”). I honestly don’t know what to think about that because partly I was uncomfortable with the way she portrayed autism so I was relieved to read this but now I’m actually still uncomfortable with the way she was portrayed no matter if you read her as on the spectrum or not.

    In this interview with the author she also said that her inspiration for Eleanor came from reading about loneliness and that there are people who spend all their weekends alone. And – again, authorial intent shouldn’t matter – but this made me feel worse about the book because now I’m seeing it as this was the only way the author could imagine someone being that lonely. Like, obviously there needs to be some sort of freakish trauma in the background for someone to be living that kind of freakish life… I’m well aware that this reaction is a serious case of “it’s me not you”.

    And the scene in the spa was horrible. We were supposed to laugh I guess, when Eleanor says that yes actually women who wax all their pubic hair off obviously do it to please men and that those men must be pedophiles. Wtf?! (I’m all up for discussing and analyzing the phenomenon and it’s certainly problematic but it is just nowhere near as simple as Eleanor sees it! And it’s not funny.)

  11. CelineB says:

    @Frida I also had a big problem with the fact that Eleanor had to have this tragic thing happen to her in order to end up as a lonely adult. That is the one thing that bugged me while I was reading and may have been why I kept thinking about it after which led to my finding more issues.

  12. Kate says:

    I liked the book but like others, questioned what the author was trying to say. The biggest flaw to me was the “big twist” that was completely unnecessary and actually makes the ending tie up too neatly.

    It did get me listening to The Archers again, however.

  13. Melissa says:

    I didn’t think she was on the spectrum. I read it as a mental illness wasn’t she hearing voices and suicidal? The book made me sad and angry. It was good but defiantly not funny. If I hadn’t known what sort of book it was supposed to be I would’ve expected it to turn into a thriller. Which says bad things about how people who are mentally ill are treated in books. Maybe reading it in October warped my thinking too.

  14. Sarah says:

    I listened to “Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine” on audible and I was blown away. However, I will add that I had no expectations: the novel for me was categorized simply as “newly released fiction.” To find that a library has placed Eleanor in the romance section, and that it has been marketed as a comedy is shocking—considering the actual content of the novel. It has been my experience lately to completely disregard descriptions of novels as “humorous” or “funny”–as I have been burned on so many occasions. A few months ago, after listening to a series of dark and emotionally intense novels, I was looking for something light and easy. Well, I went ahead purchased an audible book described as romantic and humorous. Guess what? The novel was about a gay man, in the 1980s, WITH AIDS! You can probably imagine how that went! But, I digress, my point is simply that misrepresenting a novel (for sales or by accident) is absolutely detrimental to a reader’s experience, even if the novel is brilliant. Eleanor is a haunting read, it has some funny moments—yes, I did laugh a few times as the narrator on the audible version is actually brilliant—but mostly I cringed and felt terrible for Eleanor and her pain. But, I also adored that it was a story of redemption and of learning to experience life and joy again, despite the pain. But, seriously, ignore publishers touting “funny” or worse “darkly humorous” new fiction—it’s a lie, A LIE, I TELL YOU!! 🙂

  15. Kathy says:

    I’m so glad I picked up on the hints and didn’t read this book. Certainly here in the UK it has been marketed almost like chick lit, which it clearly isn’t. I prefer my books with a side of HEA, and think this sounds like my worst nightmare. Nothing is sadder than someone with this sort of problem being used as a basis for humour, even if it’s ironic and self aware. Yuck.

  16. Desiree says:

    I read the blurb on Amazon and the tone is very much dramedy, the way that a book like Wonder is; You are supposed to take the subject matter seriously but do get warm laughs out of what characters say and do. Like in the scene where Eleanor goes to get waxed, when she wonders whether it would be too embarrassing to put her underwear out in plain view, the same as her pants, decides against it and stuffs them into a bag. All while preparing for a procedure where her naked body will be exposed and touched.

    I don’t know if it is brought up after the blurb ends but, oh boy, is that esthetician terrible at her job and asking for one hell of a lawsuit. She not only doesn’t consult a client, especially a new one, before they get going on a very painful and intimate procedure but doesn’t pick up that this client is very obviously a newbie. I’m the daughter of a someone in the industry and I’ve never heard of a “Hollywood” ;”Brazilian” is the full-blown Barbie doll look: I had to look up that “Hollywood” is a name for a full “Brazilian”. Also, what brain-dead receptionist booked the appointment in the first place w/o asking what the situation for the client was and how did the esthetician not want to rip off said receptionist’s head for being so dumb? Extra time would be needed to consult a new client: Medical issues; Psychological issues; This stuff needs to be known, especially since a client needs to sign a disclaimer or be straight up turned away. I haven’t read any more than the blurb but the woman deserves every last verbal bitch-slap Eleanor gives her.

    Kathy, I never got the impression that Eleanor was supposed to be the subject of real-world ridicule by the story but rather that we go with her on her journey and laugh with her at her fumbles and triumphs. The story even plays with perspective, as when Billy, may he rot in hell, has a very different idea of what went down the night they went out together than what she does.

  17. Susan Arden says:

    Well done review, Lara! On point in touching upon the undercurrent of sadness that runs through Eleanor Oliphant is Fine. However, I found several humorous moments, in that same vein as Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances. A woman out of touch with reality, desperate for love, and clueless about social norms. Superiority is a defense and doing things ‘right’ is Eleanor’s armor.

  18. Tilly says:

    I have ALMOST finished it, and I want to say what struck me immediately and what I specifically logged on to say before I read all the other comments and got distracted! So my responses to those further down:

    Did anyone else notice the extreme Jane Eyre shout-outs and then the ultimate Sense and Sensibility reference? I was really really thrown by the way the author just popped Jane’s childhood into Eleanor’s time in care–not that it’s out of place or a stretch because I have a friend who works as a case manager and the Reeds fit right in, but using all the names–Brocklehurst, John, Liza, Georgie, and the Reeds, and then MARIA TEMPLE–that was really confusing to me. it wasn’t the kind of intertextuality Aaronovitch indulges in, it was just… odd.
    Anyone else have a reaction to this?

    I actually did think the book had some funny moments, but I also have an uncomfortable lot in common with Eleanor. My mom isn’t murderous but she’s an abusively sexually inappropriate narcissist and I’m STILL learning how normal people communicate and interact and work with each other and I’m 34, so some of that painful stuff–it was still painful but it was also painfully funny.

    But other things, I have to agree about tone. I understand that the author was intending to convey how much her mom damaged her that her mom was this fatphobic classist lingering voice in her head but that little revelation on the bus just didn’t cut it, imo. The editor should have chopped all of it out, beginning with “fatties”.

    I think I have two more chapters to go (got it w my audible credit) and I think I’m seeing a romance looming up and I’m pretty bummed about that, if it happens. I did not read any reviews (including this one until just now) so I was sort of hoping for a nice meditation on loneliness and trauma and how hard it is building connections in your thirties, esp as a child of crazy people who really stunted your communication skills. I would be DELIGHTED for Eleanor to live happily with Glen and have Raymond as a friendo but… I’m sensing that’s not what I’m in for.

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  20. Heath says:

    I just finished this book and it started as a love/hate in my feelings of the characters, but like Lara and many others didn’t find this book hilarious. I was looking for lightness and there were some light moments but to me there was so much darkness in Elinor’s world. I was happy that characters introduced who saw beyond the scars and brought light to her world. A good read but much more darkness than expected.

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