'Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine' by Gail Honeyman.

December 10, 2017

  I completed my twenty-eighth book this year, and it was the best book. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is more than a fine novel. Rarely do I leave a comment when rating a book on Goodreads, but I had to express myself in hopes of encouraging others to read it as well. Below is a bit of the review:

  It's quite hard for me to articulate why I love this book as much as I do, but I cannot recommend it enough. I am moved and was touched at the core of my being in so many ways. There were moments I had complete empathy for and related to Eleanor, and in other moments I was utterly cringing to be in her thoughts, especially chapters with Mummy. There is no way to prepare for it.

  As my sister and I each have unique relationships with our mother, this hit my heart in ways I didn't expect. Though our situations don't align, the feelings provoked are very similar; worthlessness, loneliness, feeling doomed, never good enough...

  I'll end you with short and long passages I felt the need to document for myself. Some snippets are clever or funny but dark, and others just relatable:

I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person's hand holding mine. There have been times when I felt that I might die of loneliness... When I feel like that, my head drops and my shoulders slump and I ache, I physically ache, for human contact -- I truly feel that I might tumble to the ground and pass away if someone doesn't hold me, touch me. I don't mean a lover -- this recent madness aside, I had long given up on any notion that another person might love me that way -- but simply as a human being...

 Another bad sign - someone or something had turned the vodka into water. This was not my perferred kind of miracle.

These days, loneliness is the new cancer - a shameful, embarassing thing, brough 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 afficled, or that it might tempt fate into visitng a similar horror upon them.

There was a hand-gel dispenser outside the ward, and a big yellow sign above it read Do Not Drink. Did people actually drink sanitizing hand gel? I supposed they must - hence the sign. Part of me, a very small sliver, briefly considered dipping my head to taste a drop, purely because I'd been ordered not to. No, Eleanor, I told myseld. Curb your rebellious tendencies. Stick to tea, coffee and vodka.