Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

“I was fine, perfectly fine on my own, but I needed to keep Mummy happy, keep her calm so she would leave me in peace. A boyfriend—a husband?—might just do the trick. It wasn’t that I needed anyone. I was, as I previously stated, perfectly fine.” 

Although Eleanor lives independently and claims to be content, she hears her Mummy’s biting disapproval haunting her at every turn. Her fixation on Johnnie Lomond proves a response to this trauma, which also informs the extraordinary measures she takes to win the musician’s heart. 

“She looked closely at me, as so many people had done before, scrutinizing my face for any traces of Mummy, enjoying some strange thrill at being this close to a blood relative of the woman the newspapers still occasionally referred to, all these years later, as the pretty face of evil.” 

Social worker June Mullen gazes at Eleanor with a familiar pity and morbid curiosity that Eleanor resents. Eleanor obscures the truth of the fire and its lingering damage, protecting herself from outsiders and the darker recesses of her own mind. This moment also highlights Eleanor’s deep fear of becoming her villainous Mummy. 

“A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a potted plant, is she certifiable? I’m confident that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.” 

Polly the parrot plant is a childhood birthday present that survived the difficult events of Eleanor’s youth. Now, in Eleanor’s isolation, Polly the plant has become a surrogate friend. Her use of the word “certifiable” foreshadows that although not delusional, she does have mental health issues that will surface later in the novel. 

“‘Eleanor was insolent and rude to Mrs. Reed on a daily basis. When Mrs. Reed attempted to discipline her, for example, by sending her upstairs to the spare room to reflect on her behavior, she had become hysterical and, on one occasion, physically violent [...].’” 

The Social Services note from Eleanor’s file provides a secondary vantage on Eleanor as a child in foster care, and the contents reveal an instability the protagonist vehemently denies. This instability results from serious childhood trauma that went untreated throughout her foster care experience. She later laments the lack of emotional care she received in the system, which leaves adult Eleanor with symptoms like self-abuse and depression.

“There: soft fingers on vibrating steel, and a chord shimmered into the air, nebulous and milky, like light from an old, old star. A voice: warm and low and gentle, a voice to cast spells, charm snakes, shape the course of dreams. I could do nothing but turn toward it and lean closer. I pressed myself against the glass. […] He sang of nature, my handsome Orpheus. His voice. His voice!” 

Eleanor presents as a pragmatic, intellectual person, but in private she allows fantasies of Johnnie Lomond to sweep her away. The lush language of the passage speaks to the intensity of Eleanor’s romanticism, a quality she reveals to no one but the reader. As she stands outside the musician’s apartment door, she maintains physical distance from him and can allow herself to maintain her grand assumptions about him. 

“There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out.” 

Although Eleanor often denies the depth of her inner pain, she knows that early traumas might have diminished her capacity to form and maintain healthy relationships with others. She has grown accustomed to people’s neglect and derision, but she hopes to enter a relationship with the musician that both accesses her unscarred heart and heals the scars that remain. 

“Twice in one day, to be the recipient of thanks and warm regard! I would never have suspected that small deeds could elicit such genuine, generous responses. I felt a little glow inside—not a blaze, more like a small, steady candle.” 

Part of Eleanor’s dramatic arc in the novel involves the power of generosity. Through helping Sammy during his fall and Mrs. Gibbons with her household chores, Eleanor feels the rare warmth of companionship and self-esteem. Later scenes in the novel show other characters extending kindness to Eleanor, and although she resists help, she learns she can’t heal without it. 

“‘Oh, you think you’re so smart now, don’t you, with your job and your new friends. But you’re not smart, Eleanor. You’re someone who lets people down. Someone who can’t be trusted. Someone who failed. Oh yes, I know exactly what you are. And I know how you’ll end up. Listen, the past isn’t over. The past is a living thing. Those lovely scars of yours—they’re from the past, aren’t they? And yet they still live on your plain little face.’” 

Mummy unleashes her fury upon Eleanor over the phone, and on its face the scene reveals her to be an abusive, vindictive, and erratic parent. In fact, the phone call occurs in Eleanor’s imagination. She is berating herself as a failure, and she still fears her Mummy’s fury to the utmost, despite her mother’s death in the fire.  

“‘Don’t cry, love,’ he said. ‘Honestly, they’re not even that good.’ He leaned in confidentially. ‘I helped the singer bring in his gear in from his car this afternoon. Bit of an arsehole, to be honest with you. You shouldn’t let a wee bit of success go to your head, that’s all I’m saying. Nice to be nice, eh?’ I nodded, wondering which singer he was talking about…” 

In a moment of dramatic irony, Honeyman shows that the singer is not the sensitive artist Eleanor assumes; rather, he is unkind and conceited. The haze of Eleanor’s crush is so thick, however, that she misunderstands the man who warns her about Johnnie’s true nature. 

“That said, I did sometimes wonder what it would be like to have someone—a cousin, say, or a sibling—to call on in times of need, or even just to spend unplanned time with. Someone who knows you, cares about you, who wants the best for you. A houseplant, however attractive and robust, doesn’t quite cut the mustard, unfortunately. Pointless even to speculate, though. I had no one, and it was futile to wish it were otherwise. After all, it was no more than I deserved. And really, I was fine, fine, fine.” 

Eleanor can’t quite settle on whether she’s independent or lonely. She has observed Sammy with his family and Raymond with his mother, prompting her to wonder whether she’s missing out on something essential. Eleanor won’t stoop to self-pity, however, claiming she’s not worthy of family connection and taking heart in her new social life. 

“‘I’ll give you a shoulder-length, lightly layered choppy bob, with caramel and honey pieces woven through and a long sweeping fringe,’ she said. ‘How does that sound?’ ‘It sounds like an incomprehensible pile of gibberish,’ I said. She laughed at my reflection, and then stopped, perhaps because I wasn’t laughing. ‘Trust me, Eleanor,’ she said earnestly. ‘It’ll be beautiful.’” 

Like other social conventions, Eleanor knows nothing of current cosmetology trends, and Laura takes her wry comment as a joke. Rather than derision, Eleanor receives encouragement in the face of her uncertainty, increasing her confidence in trying new things. 

“‘[...] I’m sure you’d make a great office manager.’ I looked at him closely, waiting for a follow-up remark or a snide comment, but, much to my surprise, neither was forthcoming. He took out his wallet and paid the bill. [...] This was the first day in nine years that I’d eaten lunch with a companion, and that I hadn’t done the crossword.”

Raymond upends Eleanor’s pattern of loneliness, although Eleanor initially resists his attempts to connect. In this scene, Eleanor has asked for his advice, and Raymond offers not only that but a compliment as well. Eleanor is pleased to experience the generosity she has missed for so long and recognizes that her promotion and this budding friendship are positive developments. 

“Was this how it worked, then, successful social integration? Was it really that simple? Wear some lipstick, go to the hairdressers and alternate the clothes you wear? Someone ought to write a book, or at least an explanatory pamphlet, and pass this information on.” 

Eleanor’s coworkers surprise her with their compliments about her new hair and clothing. She doesn’t understand that aesthetic conformity has additional benefits besides the attraction of a romantic partner. People follow beauty and fashion trends in order to gain approval from everyone, and Eleanor has missed that intrinsic social instinct due in part to her unconventional upbringing. 

“I wasn’t good at pretending, that was the thing. After what had happened in that burning house, given what went on there, I could see no point in being anything other than truthful with the world. I had, literally, nothing left to lose. But, by careful observation from the sidelines, I’d worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little. Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don’t find very funny, do things they don’t particularly want to, with people whose company they don’t particularly enjoy. Not me. I had decided, years ago, that if the choice was between that or flying solo, then I’d fly solo. It was safer that way. Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.” 

Having faced the brink of death, Eleanor places great value in expressing her truth—no matter how other people receive it—and very little value in artifice. Eleanor is also not as socially ignorant as she often appears, expressing the plight of “popular” people with elegant efficiency. Moreover, after losing her only sister and her mother to the fire, she has decided that relationships are not worth the risk.

“Why, now, did Raymond want to be my friend? Perhaps he was lonely too. Perhaps he felt sorry for me. Perhaps—incredible, this, but, I supposed, possible—he actually found me likable.” 

Eleanor does not deem herself worthy of fulfilling human connection without significant changes to her appearance and her personality. Her first friend in many years, Raymond accepts Eleanor for who she is, flaws and all, before her transformation is complete. 

“Tonight, I was going to meet the man whose love would change my life. I was ready to rise from the ashes and be reborn.” 

Eleanor sees herself as insufficient and incomplete, hence her desire to die and be reborn like a phoenix. She sees love from a worthy man as the means of this transformation. The fire imagery also highlights the significance of the fateful fire that occurred during Eleanor’s childhood. 

“I was a thirty-year-old woman with a juvenile crush on a man whom I didn’t know, and would never know. I had convinced myself that he was the one, that he would help to make me normal, fix the things that were wrong with my life. Someone to help me deal with Mummy, block out her voice when she whispered in my ear, telling me I was bad, I was wrong, I wasn’t good enough. Why had I thought that?” 

Eleanor intuits that she needs something in life, but until now she has spent the story pursuing a fantasy in order to fulfill her needs. Her true need is not romance but a release from the toxic influence of her Mummy and the assurance that she is not “bad” at all. 

“These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought 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 afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.” 

This passage expresses the heart of the novel. Honeyman has used Eleanor as an avatar of the modern phenomenon of loneliness, and here Eleanor herself identifies why people tend to treat the lonely as pariahs, rather than provide them the company they need. She herself has not expressed her loneliness aloud to another person in this novel, illustrating the fear and shame she expresses here. 

“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.” 

Eleanor has spent the novel denying the severity of her issues, not only with others but within her own mind. She knows society wants her to pretend all is well; at some level, she wants to pretend it, too. The concert, however, has shattered the facade and shown her how much she wants to express her struggles and find the companionship she craves. 

“‘Here’s a scenario. I’ll run it by you and you can see what you think. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, Eleanor, that you had developed a crush on this man. These sorts of feelings are generally a sort of emotional “trial run” for a real relationship. They’re very intense.’ [...] I slumped back into my seat. She had taken me by surprise with her startlingly accurate summary of how things had been, and then asked a very interesting, pertinent question. Despite the gold shoes and the novelty key rings, I could see already that Maria Temple was no fool.” 

Trained to approach conversation defensively, Eleanor has arrived at Maria Temple’s office ready to deflect the therapist’s questions and silently criticize her fashion choices. By summarizing Eleanor’s crush on the musician, Dr. Temple has proven a worthy adversary for Eleanor by listening well, demonstrating empathy, and not letting Eleanor get by with her usual terseness or sarcasm.  

“The singer wasn’t ever the point, really; Maria Temple had helped me see that. In my eagerness to change, to connect with someone, I’d focused on the wrong thing, the wrong person. On the charge of being a catastrophic disaster, a failed human being, I was starting to find myself, with Maria’s help, not guilty.” 

Eleanor’s dearth of self-awareness makes for some of the most intense comic and tragic moments in the novel. Her hero’s journey has involved painful revelations that lead to transformative self-discovery. She has entrusted Dr. Temple with her deepest thoughts and feelings in pursuit of mental health, a task she never would have undertaken at the beginning of the story. Now, she has reversed the self-hatred patterns she has spent so long cultivating and begun to forgive herself for past mistakes.  

“‘Mummy set a fire. She wanted to kill us both, except, somehow, Marianne died and I didn’t.’” 

Eleanor has spent the story suggesting what happened in the fire, but her mind has repressed the full scope of the narrative, leaving readers to put together clues for themselves. With the help of therapy, Eleanor is equipped to face the truth of her past. No longer does she defend her mother or put off questions about her sister, Marianne; rather, she states the full story without fear. 

“This is what I felt: the warm weight of his hands on me; the genuineness in his smile; the gentle heat of something opening, the way some flowers spread out in the morning at the sight of the sun. I knew what was happening. It was the unscarred piece of my heart. It was just big enough to let in a bit of affection. There was still a tiny bit of room left.” 

Eleanor strove after the musician in order to mend the scars on her heart, but she has abandoned that fantasy for the very real friendship Raymond provides. She has opened herself to receive his love and found her heart much more tender than anticipated. Now she recognizes the value of this reciprocal relationship and how it has helped undo the lonely lifestyle she once feared she would never escape.