Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is a 2019 literary fiction novel by Gail Honeyman. It was published by Penguin Randomhouse in 2019 and became a New York Times bestseller. Reese Witherspoon selected it as one of her book club picks and it’s going to become a motion picture in the near future.

The novel follows the titular character Eleanor Oliphant, an accounting clerk in her late twenties living a very lonely and strictly scheduled life. Everything changes when she meets her new coworker Raymond who is determined to find a way to bring Eleanor out of her shell. Along the way, his big heart helps her repair her own heavily damaged one.

To start off, I’d like to point out that this book is not a romance. I know the blurb written above, which I paraphrased from the back of the book, makes it sound like one, but its not. The novel isn’t the story of a man and a woman meeting unexpectedly and falling in love. Instead, it’s a story about an unlikely friendship and said friendship being that catalyst in Eleanor realizing some difficult truths about herself and her past.

This book was recommended to me by a coworker. She’d begun reading it and thought it was an amusing story, which it is at first. At the beginning, Eleanor’s inner monologue is funny. She doesn’t have great social skills, she doesn’t know how to relate to people and doesn’t have a filter. She’s, for lack of a better term, a weirdo and spends a lot of time judging people for perfectly normal behavior that she finds strange. At first, Eleanor’s eccentricities were funny. I was reading about a story about an incredibly strange woman who was wondering why everyone else seemed so strange to her. Before long, however, it stopped being funny. Because Eleanor’s whole life, a boring job, no real connections to anyone, adhering to a strict schedule, is the result of a very troubled upbringing. She strives to be normal, but her childhood makes any idea of “normal” completely impossible. There are small moments of humor, but mostly the book is rather sad.

I don’t want to make it seem like I didn’t enjoy this book, because I did. It was a thorough deep-dive into self-discovery and self-improvement. It also delves into discussion trauma and how it can affect people. The author went out of her way to show Eleanor going through a major change in her life without it changing her personality completely. Eleanor still has her quirks at the end of the book, and she wouldn’t be described as “normal” but she’s in a healthier place. She’s stopped ignoring her problems and confronted some of the issues she’s been burying for so long.

Eleanor is an interesting character, although a tad bit annoying at times. Scenes where she’s being overly judgmental towards people for doing things like not knowing how to respond to something she said, or trying to have a conversation with her are hard to read. Her inability to relate to people makes sense in the context of the story, but until it becomes clear that there’s more to her than just that, she’s difficult to like. Raymond is one of the first people Eleanor really lets in because he seems to accept her exactly as she is. Sure, sometimes if she says something that’s inappropriate he’ll tell her, but he’s not trying to change her. He realizes that she’s not doing well, and wants to help her, but not in a way that’s self-serving. She’s his friend and he wants his friend to get better. Even in moments when Eleanor doesn’t want his help, but needs it. Another character that changes Eleanor’s life is an elderly man Sammy. Shortly after Eleanor and Raymond meet, they save Sammy when he falls and injures himself. Raymond continues to check in on Sammy after he’s taken to the hospital and talks Eleanor into joining him. During these visits, Eleanor starts to open up a bit more to both men and for the first time in a long time, develops a real connection with other people. The last character I want to discuss, and the one who had the biggest impact on Eleanor by far, is Mummy, her mother. Eleanor doesn’t see Mummy but at the beginning of the novel, they talk over the phone every Wednesday night. Mummy is a piece of work to say the least. Several of their calls are depicted in the story, but you only need one to understand their relationship dynamic. Mummy is a terrible mother, abusive in more than one way, and yet everything Eleanor does is in an attempt to please her mother. Mummy is the antagonist of this story, and her connection to Eleanor’s trauma is what propels the story forward.

I liked Eleanor’s character journey. I like the realizations she came to along the way as she let more people in and realized that she wasn't “fine” regardless of how often she claimed to be. What I liked most, however, was that the ending didn’t wrap everything up neatly. Eleanor doesn’t end the book by being completely recovered from her trauma. There isn’t a happy ending, just a realistic one. She’s getting better, her life has improved, but she still has a long way to go.

I didn’t love this book. I also didn’t hate it. I wish that the blurb adhered a little closer to the actual story than it did. Still, it’s an entertaining slice-of-life story while also discussing heavier themes. I’m not eagerly awaiting the motion picture, unlike some other readers I've talked to, but it’s a good book overall.

Rating: 2.9 stars

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