Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

This is the first novel by a Scottish writer. It has been getting alot of positive press so I thought I would read it.

It is about a young woman who is very lonely and isolated.  She is the survivor of a traumatic event in her childhood that saw her moved from foster home to foster home and group home to group home.  She was not maltreated there but she was not loved.  Once a week Eleanor receives a phone call from her mother who keeps berating and threatening her.  She dreads these calls.

She is working in a a job as an accounts clerk, she has no life, she works then comes home to the same meal every night and drinks herself into oblivion on weekends with vodka.

She doesn't think life can get any better, she lives in a suite provided to her by the state, furnished with other people's cast offs but she doesn't seem to care.  She is stockpiling pain killers.

Eleanor is disfigured by burns on her face from a fire.  She sticks to herself and her workmates find her strange and aloof.  However, a tech guy in the company befriends her and invites her for coffee, to meet his mother etc.  One day they are out walking and they find a man collapsed on the street.  Eleanor talks to the unconscious man while they are awaiting help.   The man survives and Eleanor and Raymond go to visit him in the hospital.  The patient is grateful to them and welcomes them warmly.  They are introduced to his family.  As Eleanor has these interactions she starts to see what a family is like.  This is an eye-opener to her.  She doesn't have a frame of reference for a healthy family.

Eleanor is at a club and sees the lead singer of a band, she falls head over heels for him and starts to imagine that they will get into a relationship.  She buys a computer so she can track him on the web, she buys new clothes, gets a new hairdo and even gets her face done and buys makeup so she can be presentable to to the man she hopes will be her beau.  She even visits where he lives.

Sadly, the man that Eleanor and Raymond saved dies a few weeks later.  They are both very sad at his death.

Eleanor buys tickets for a concert by the man she has been stalking.  She dresses up in her new clothes.  As the concert progresses she realizes that the musician will never really see her or be attracted to her.   She chastises herself for being a thirty something women with a teenage crush. She goes home and drinks herself into oblivion.  She would probably have died but Raymond arrives at her home, cleans up the mess she has made and brings her food and flowers.  He insists she see a doctor who diagnoses her with clinical depression.  He offers her drugs but she declines.  He insists she see a counsellor and she agrees to do this.  She is off work for a few weeks to recuperate.

As she goes to therapist she gradually opens up about the trauma she has suffered.  As a child she and her sister had a nutcase of a mother.  The Mother keeps telling them they are better than other people and insists they speak well and dress well.  But while she lectures them at times she beats them and starves them.  When teacher's notice the bruises on the children the mother pulls them out of school.
One day the mother sets fire to their home, planning to kill the two children.  Eleanor's young sister dies in the fire.  Eleanor finally remembers her sister and admits that she feels guilty that she was not able to protect and save her sister.  The therapist assures her this is not her fault.  A surprise crops up however, we learn that Eleanor's sister AND mother died in the fire.  So all these years Eleanor had been imagining the weekly phone calls from her mother.

As the book ends Eleanor has a friend, a cat and the people at work welcome her back warmly when she returns to work.  It looks like Eleanor will be fine.

This was a very sad book at times.  The author did an excellent job of portraying a very disfunctional, lonely and isolated human.  She did a great job of showing the transformation of Eleanor from a person totally isolated from society to a person who is gradually growing and learning how to behave in society.