Really Good, Actually: The must-read major Sunday Times bestselling debut novel of 2023

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Fans of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Queenieor shows like HBO's Girlswill want to give it a read. It was a long time ago, but I do remember doing some pretty crazy shit, so I had a decent amount of compassion for Maggie. For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood. Reading like a millennial Nora Ephron, everyone will fall in love with the messy and relatable heroine.

Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey | Waterstones

i agree that there were a lot of moments that i cringed through while the FMC self sabotaged her life, but something about it felt relatable? Without much pull-through this starts to feel repetitive, whiny and narcissistic - yes, we know that the narrator is going through a painful divorce, I just would have liked more direct emotion and connection on the page and less of the self-pity.I don’t know if predictable is quite the right word for “Really Good, Actually”, but it does sound like a story you may have heard before.

Really Good, Actually: A Novel by Monica Heisey | Goodreads Really Good, Actually: A Novel by Monica Heisey | Goodreads

For instance, Maggie torpedoes her relationship with a guy named Simon because he’s “too nice” to her. Luckily Maggie has a great group of friends to depend on, but this is a tumultuous period in her life, and it's going to take some big changes to turn it around. We liked enough of the same things and made each other laugh, and our arguments were only as dramatic as the arguments of all our other twentysomething friends.I suspect the material would have worked better in short essay-style pieces: as a novel this feels laboured and lacks dynamic forward movement.

Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey review - The Guardian

Monica Heisey was born in Toronto at the very end of the 1980s and has spent most of her adult life in London, after moving there in 2010 to pursue an MA in early modern literature. At once self-mocking and serious, Heisey’s whip-smart tale of Millennial disillusionment and dawning self-knowledge sends up ‘personal growth’ cliches while exploring friendship, sexuality, body image and online performativity .Eventually we moved in together—we’d been dating the right amount of time and neither of us could afford to live alone. Regardless of whether you have experienced a significant break up or not, there's some value here for any reader. Freshly divorced Maggie is open to trying and doing new things, including dating, journalling, working out and standing up for herself. And it also had so much compassion for the protagonist even as she made mistakes and generally had compassion for heartbroken people everywhere. It’s a thoroughly modern take on 1990s chick lit, exaggeratedly over the top in the best possible way.

Monica Heisey About | Monica Heisey

This morning, after he left, I’d almost immediately taken a photo of myself, wanting to “preserve the moment” and entertaining grandiose ideas about this horrible loss marking the start of a very creatively generative time.Maggie’s marriage is ending only six hundred and eight days after it began (despite being together nearly a decade) . Somewhere in the midst of Maggie’s adventures – flirtations with bisexuality, frantic spin classes, recreational axe throwing – she is grappling with the question of responsibility. But during that, I was constantly trying to hide from the cringy parts while simultaneously laughing at the absolute absurdity of some of it.