Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine: Debut Sunday Times Bestseller and Costa First Novel Book Award winner

Should I make myself over from the inside out, or work from the outside in?

Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.

I wondered how it would feel to perform such simple deeds for other people. I

palimpsest

Emily Dickinson’s beautiful poem is called Wild Nights – Wild Nights!, and combines two elements of which I am inordinately fond: punctuation, and the theme of finding, at long last, a soul mate.

She was, quite simply, a nice lady who’d raised a family and now lived quietly with her cats and grew vegetables. This was both nothing and everything.

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

She had tried to steer me towards vertiginous heels again – why are these people so incredibly keen on crippling their female customers? I began to wonder if cobblers and chiropractors had established some fiendish cartel.

I’m certain that they merely served to alienate the majority of us from physical activity for life.