Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Eleanor Oliphant is

Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman speaks to the heart of people. I decided of buying this book at the second-hand store of the ladies of Books for Dogs in Umbertide because it was trendy. Per months wherever I went on Instagram there was the cover of Eleanor Oliphant. I was curious. The lady of the bookstore said me that it was fun and that I would have smiled a lot reading it.

Maybe, of course it's a story of tastes and perceptions but this story didn't make me smile at all.

I add that yesteday I went at a meeting organized by our regional order of the Journalists. They explained us how to treat news involving children. This topic is delicate and needs attention. We, journalists, followed with great attention various relators. One of them, a lady, talked to us of what it means for a kid, pretty little, being abused and in what way these silences could be broken, also from us, and these stories told.

Abusers, ogres, are first of all in the familiar circuit and it means a word: silence, and then shame; it means incredubility and most of the time the kid affected by violence is not heard, understood or protected, because the honor of the family must be protected in a spiral of secrets and mysteries pretty senseless.

That lady made us a precise request: the one of writing about this thematic.

I thought that, I was reading Eleanor Oliphant, there wasn't best book for starting.

This book speaks to the heart of people as said before but mainly focuces the attention on a problem, the one of toxic families that it is big like a house and that leaves for the children abused, treated bad a sad, weird, not completely negative, but different future from the one that could have had, if grown up in an harmonic family.

Eleanor Oliphant works in an office, she idealizes a love with a musician she doesn't know, she lives alone, she talks once per week with her dead mother and she drinks too vodka during her spare time.

The fact were these ones: at the age of 29 years the motherpf Eleanor  decided of killing her, the sister and herself in a fire. She intoxicated the children so that they could sleep and then she started the fire. Eleanor tried all her best for saving the sister but it was impossible.

That one who wanted the end of her and her sister was her mother. How could she cope with this horror? Her mother didn't dream for her a good future, just her end.

How could a kid so shocked breaking the relationship with her mother? So, although dead, Eleanor feels her voice, and answers back. Imagining what her mother would have asked her; what would have waited for her. That mother is resentful, that mother admonishes her: after all she has her same blood in the veins; what does she want her daughter from life?

Eleanor doesn't know what a normal family means because the rest of her time spent with foster families and problems are not yet over.

One day, she knows Raymond for casualty; they hang out together and they both, literally save an old man, calling the ambulance.

It's the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and not only: once Eleanor will visit the house of Raymond's mother; she will discover what it means the maternal experience; children, the essence of a family; the mother of Raymond will insist for letting her see the pictures of the various children she had had and in some way, the history of her family. To Eleanor this perception of reality was absolutely unknown and abstract. Too strong for not starting to crying violently. In the many terrors of Eleanor also the one of having children for later killing them as did her mother with her sister.

Being a complicated story the one of Eleanor it is also perfect for something dangerous, but absolutely understandable. Not only: I think that, psychologically these episodes can save the existences of people abused: fantasy, day-dreaming, the creation of a best imaginery world, considering all the horror experienced becomes indispensible for going on although Eleanor maybe doesn't know the world as it is, but as she lived it, and it means a big distortion in every sense; the one of the musician she starts to imagining as her perfect match; the other side of the coin, the other half of the apple, is just one of the happy bubbles where she loves to staying for not coping often with a past too brutal to her.

Later, of course she understood her hallucination and her idealization.

In an extreme, to my point of view passage of the book, when Eleanor is partially healing, abused children won't never heal completely but they can cope with the unusual life they experienced, she will say: "The voice in my own head - my own voice - was quiet rational and sensible, I'd begun to realize. It was Mummy's voice that had done all the judging, and encouraged me to do so too. I was getting to quite like my own voice, my own thoughts. I wanted more of them. They made me feel good, calm even. They made me feel like me."

The final phrase is shocking and a revelation for Eleanor. She understands that all these years she thoughts with the toxic thoughts maybe, generated by her mother if alive, searching for her mother, distorting what she would have said her, in a manipulation first of all wanted and created by herself because unable of breaking the most important relationship existing in the world: the one with the mother.

Eleanor's mother was dead years ago, but, as she says in another passage of this book, that one was the only mother she had had and good or bad that she had been, she could just use her as a term of comparison because she couldn't never have other examples and no other ones would have been in this life her mother.

But then Eleanor understands: understands that her own thoughts, her own self is wonderful and that she musn't never have fear of being who she is, because the past, this time will be buried forever thanks to Raymond and nothing if not a possible happiness will follow in the heavy existence of this 30 years old girl, trapped by her past and the phantom of her mother.

Superbly written, Gail Honeyman puts the reader in that ecstatic condition of not being in grade of putting down the book 'til the end; wonderful storyteller, she narrated the experienced lived by Eleanor with the voice of the protagonist.

I warmly suggest to everyone this book. I insist: you can search for irony, and humor and I am sure you will find it, but I didn't smile at all because when an existence, in this case imagined, is ruined, it's for the entire life.

Anna Maria Polidori