By Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant is a single woman of nearly thirty. She works in an office and has been there for nine years. She's a bit of an odd duck and has no close friends at work. Or any friends at all.
As a child, she nearly died in a house fire and has a scar on her face that some people find distressing or off-putting. But she is a fairly practical person and her solitude doesn't bother her much. Or rather, she deals with it on the weekends by drinking vodka by herself in her apartment. Her only company is a houseplant she calls Polly.
Three things happen that begin to chip away at her solitude, all three involving men. First, she develops a crush on a singer, Johnnie. Second, a new employee at work, Raymond, seems to like her and invites her to have lunch. Third, while out one day, she and Raymond see an elderly man collapse on the street. They stay with the man, Sammy, until the medics arrive. They also accompany Sammy to the hospital. Eleanor and Raymond become acquainted with Sammy's family and attend a welcome home party in Sammy's honor after he gets out of the hospital. And Raymond also introduces Eleanor to his mother who is quite elderly and suffering from arthritis.
Eleanor is not romantically interested in Raymond. She has constructed an improbable fantasy around the singer, Johnnie. The good thing is that it has given her the motivation to update her look with new clothes, makeup and a new hairdo. As a result, her coworkers have also warmed up a bit to her and she has been offered a promotion and a small raise. She is finally starting to live a little. Then she goes to see Johnnie perform and something about it causes her to realize that she was just fooling herself. She goes on a bender, drinking herself into stupor. Raymond comes to check up on her and cleans her up. Clearly, she needs professional help. So she starts seeing a therapist and the walls she built around the fire that left her scarred slowly start to come down and she faces the truth she had hidden from since she was just a kid.
This book is ride. Eleanor is a funny sad lonely woman. Her story is so tragic, so very sad. But she is hilarious at times, in the first part of the story, the part the author calls the Good Days, her observations are so amusing. I really enjoyed her take on things. But the last section, the Bad Days, was not amusing. I cried so much, reading her sad struggle with abuse and depression, how the system failed her as a child, her loneliness, her trauma, her suffering overlooked or unseen.
When Raymond took her to his mom's house for a visit, Eleanor recognized all she had missed in life as a child:
"I placed the laundry basket on the ground and took the peg bag ... and hung it on the line. The washing was dry and smelled of summer. I heard the syncopated thud of a football being kicked against a wall, and girls chanting as a skipping rope skimmed the ground. The distant chimes of the ice-cream van were now almost audible. Someone's back door slammed, and a man's voice shouted a furious reprimand at—one hoped—a dog. There was birdsong, a descant over the sounds of a television drifting through an open window. Everything felt safe, everything felt normal. How different Raymond's life had been from mine—a proper family, a mother and a father and a sister, nestled among other proper families. How different it was still; every Sunday, here, this."
Eventually Eleanor realizes that her crush on Johnnie is merely that. Watching him onstage, it bursts upon her that she has been lost in a fantasy, a lovely fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless:
"I didn't know the man onstage before me, didn't know the first thing about him. It was all just fantasy. Could anything be more pathetic—me, a grown woman? I'd told myself a sad little fairy tale, thinking I could fix everything, undo the past, that he and I would live happily ever after and Mummy wouldn't be angry anymore. I was Eleanor, sad little Eleanor Oliphant, with my pathetic job, my vodka and my dinners for one, and I always would be. Nothing and no one —certainly not this singer ...—could change that. There was no hope, things couldn't be put right. I couldn't be put right. The past could neither be escaped nor undone. After all these weeks of delusion, I recognized, breathless, the pure, brutal truth of it. I felt despair and nausea mingled inside me, and then that familiar black, black mood came down fast."
But the book has its lighter side, Eleanor's little comments on the people around her:
- "Heather [a social worker] used to do that too; I assume it's part of the job, checking to make sure I'm not storing my own urine in demijohns or kidnapping magpies and sewing them into pillowcases."
- "Sexual union between lovers should be a sacred, private thing. It should not be a topic for discussion with strangers over a display of edible underwear."
- "I have often noticed that people who routinely wear sportswear are the least likely sort to participate in athletic activity."
- "The streets were all named after poets ... who wrote about urns and flowers and wandering clouds. Based on past experience, I'd be more likely to end up living in Dante Lane or Poe Crescent."