That’s everyone’s socially acceptable response when someone asks “How are you?”, right? But how often is it actually true?

My initial reaction to the first third of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman (despite some clues in the opening pages that would have led me elsewhere had I been paying sufficient attention), was that it reminded me of The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion. Socially awkward protagonist with no friends, wedded to routine, on whom a random suggestion acts as a catalyst to start changing things up, check. Protagonist meets someone completely outside their wheelhouse and makes an unexpected connection, check. But that’s not quite how this book ended up going. The two books share a sense of humor, and their protagonists share the quality of being literal and inept at human relations as they attempt to navigate their way through life. But the reasons behind their similar states are different, as are the resolutions.

There are lots of books out there (fiction and nonfiction) about various kinds of mental health issues. Not many of them, however, address the situation of loneliness as either a cause or an outcome. Eleanor believes that she is completely self-sufficient—after all, her physical needs are being met, and in all her years in the foster care system she didn’t get a chance to indulge any emotional needs, or even recognize that she had any. But when she has two chance encounters that change her focus, these events and the people connected with them worm their way into her formerly solitary existence and begin to show her that she had very little idea what a full life could be like.

Eleanor is, in many ways, profoundly broken, and her metamorphosis depends on courage that she wouldn’t have found without making some human connections, but it is not a romantic book, for which I was grateful. This is a book about Eleanor, and Gail Honeyman doesn’t fall into the trap of leading her out of her unhappiness by making her fall in love—in fact, quite the contrary. Her story is told in a tender, sweet, and humorous way that isn’t manipulative and never descends into mawkishness, that pulls both Eleanor and the reader out of melancholy into hopefulness. I was impressed that this was the author’s debut novel: The language, the characters, and the world in which she places them are smart and engaging, and she writes with confidence.

I have encountered only a few books that, the minute I turned the last page, I wanted to go back and re-read to see what I missed or to re-experience the emotions brought forth by the story. This was one of them.

Note: This was a re-read for me—I originally read this in 2018 and had the impulse to revisit it. The above was my review from 2018. Nothing materially changed from the reread, except that I found the book, if anything, more emotionally moving. If you enjoyed this book as I did, you might also like to read The Good Sister, by Sally Hepworth.