Trauma & Dissociation discussion

This is actually a novel (fiction) for the Dec 2025 BOTM:

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman


This novel deals with childhood trauma, as it affects an adult.

Publisher’s Summary

Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Readers' Favorite Fiction (2017)
No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine.

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.

Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .

The only way to survive is to open your heart.

I finished this book, also reading it with another book group. It is evident that something is amiss with Eleanor. It is interesting what the average person speculates is afoot. Presumably, a good therapist or anyone who has a similar history would see it different. For a time, there was quite a consensus misread. Then the author answered questions in an interview to set the record straight.

Thanks. I may try and fit this one into my reading.

This is a fictional novel and relative easy and light reading compared to our other books. It does fit the group topic though.