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Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

"Until now, anytime that emotions, feelings, had threatened to unsettle me, I'd drink them down fast, drown them.  That had allowed me to exist, but I was starting to understand that I needed, wanted, something more than that now."
Gail Honeyman's debut novel, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, tells the story of a 30-year-old woman who feels like an outsider in this world.  Shuffled from foster home to foster home after a devastating childhood incident, Eleanor has never felt a sense of family or belonging.  And then she meets Raymond.
Raymon is the IT guy at the office where Eleanor has worked her entire adult life.  He's laid back, aloof, and everything she has ever needed...only she doesn't know it just yet.  She has her eye on a handsome musician.  A man she hopes will whisk her away from her life of solitude and fix the hole in her heart that she's tried to hide so long.  Eleanor believes that the universe is pushing them together.  What she doesn't realize is that the universe is pushing her in an entirely different direction, and for good reason.
I really, really enjoyed this book.  I bought it because it had good reviews and I loved the title.  It's not what I'd normally read, however, everyone said I'd like it.  And I did.  But not for the reasons they thought.  The book is reviewed as being funny.  And while Eleanor has lots of charming and funny quirks about her (I especially love her views on society and people, myself being extremely anti-social) I found the book to be very sad with a lot of triggers that stirred up suppressed emotions of my own.  Eleanor suffers from extreme depression and isolation.  And while I may not have had the harsh, loss-filled childhood of Eleanor Oliphant, I've had my fair share of isolation.
In one part of the book Eleanor mentions that she goes home on Friday and doesn't speak to another living person until Sunday.  I've been there, quite frequently, before I had children.  Married to a military man who now travels across the country for work I know all to well what loneliness is.  I've gone not only days, but weeks without any human contact.  I have lived/do live in a place where my family is hours away and I have no friends.  And much like Eleanor you tell yourself that you are completely fine.  But are you?  
"Once you get used to being on your own, it becomes normal.  It certainly had become so for me." 
As I said, there are lots and lots of triggers in the book. The alcoholism, the abuse, the neglect, the depression, and the loneliness.  (Not all of these triggers are mine.  I'm just throwing them out there!)  Gail Honeyman does a very nice job of showing how Eleanor reflects inward to accept all of these things that have so greatly affected her life.  And she has wrote an extremely likable  character.  I found myself wishing I knew Eleanor Oliphant.  I think we'd get along quite nicely.  


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