Book 11 of my summer reading challenge and another book from my holiday reading.
Really Good, Actually
Monica Heisey
Maggie is fine. She’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s broke, her graduate thesis on something obscure is going nowhere, and her marriage only lasted 608 days, but at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new life as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée™.
Now she has time to take up nine hobbies, eat hamburgers at 4 am, and “get back out there” sex-wise. With the support of her tough-loving academic advisor, Merris; her newly divorced friend, Amy; and her group chat (naturally), Maggie barrels through her first year of single life, intermittently dating, occasionally waking up on the floor and asking herself tough questions along the way.
Laugh-out-loud funny and filled with sharp observations, Really Good, Actually is a tender and bittersweet comedy that lays bare the uncertainties of modern love, friendship, and our search for that thing we like to call “happiness”. This is a remarkable debut from an unforgettable new voice in fiction.
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This is one of those books that I kept seeing everywhere and decided that it would be perfect to pick up as a holiday read. It was certainly entertaining and I got absorbed in the story very quickly.
I liked the honesty of the book, everyone reacts to break-ups differently and whilst there are plenty of examples of this in books I don’t think I’ve come across a version that shows just how badly you can spiral down a bad path before. It was refreshing, to be honest, but it did also make for some uncomfortable reading.
I didn’t feel like I gelled with the main character, Maggie, but I also feel like that is maybe the point. She becomes a very extreme version of herself and I sometimes found her self-obsession quite difficult to read. Still, again I think that is because of how accurate the portrayal is and how it makes me reflect on times when I have been in a similar situation, thankfully not as disastrous, and on the times that I have maybe been on the other side of it wondering when they are going to get over it.
It can be such a polarising read because I liked and enjoyed the self-destruction at first, I could relate to it and it was quite funny at points. However as Maggie starts to lose control and it feels like the start of a proper breakdown it changed for me and it did make me feel quite sad and sorry for her, which was difficult to grapple with especially when there were some comical moments after that point.
I liked that getting back to herself was as much about learning to be happy with herself rather than just being happy with someone else, she almost goes down that path and you can see it working against her. I’m glad that she was forced to do the work that she managed to take the journey to repair and that the catalyst was not a man.
Really Good, Actually is not as lighthearted as I was expecting, it has some uncomfortable moments, but it is also laugh-out-loud funny. It is a fresh take on a well-known topic and whilst the main character will be difficult for some readers to swallow I appreciated her growth and her Google searches.
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