Reese Witherspoon has really good taste

I really had no idea what to expect with this book and it really blew me away. I gauged that it was definitely going to be about someone who was certainly not completely fine but this book had very unexpected depths and a wonderfully human story focused on a woman so unlike anyone I have ever known.

It centers, understandably, on a woman named Eleanor Oliphant. She has a desk job (and trusts that boring description will preclude further questions) and she has her routine, including weekly phone calls with her estranged. Every Friday she buys herself a pizza and a bottle of vodka and by Monday both are gone and hold up. That doesn’t sound … right.

This book is a beautiful and unique study of the importance of human connection. Eleanor is completely fine – she functions day to day, she pays her bills, she almost never misses work and sure she’s a little off and utterly solitary but she’s coherent and in the end everything about her life makes logical sense. She exists in the world but functions as far outside it as she can. When a  coworkers enlists her help aiding an elderly man who has collapsed in the street, she’s pulled into the world of human connection, and it helps. There’s a pivotal moment in the book, about two thirds of the way through, and it is a realization she comes to all on her own. The reader has, up until this point, been quietly groaning the way you only do when you are getting secondhand awkwardness from a character and everything you keep thinking she has to know she suddenly finally does and wow is it painful.

In the end it is a beautiful book about a woman most describe as damaged. And damaging things have happened to Eleanor. And this is about her taking full account of that and learning to chart a new course.

And it’s a quick read!