Gail Honeyman: ‘I hope Eleanor Oliphant has helped to fuel the debate on loneliness’

Every so often a novel comes along that captures hearts, minds and the urgent attentions of the nation’s book groups. In recent years we’ve had sex (Fifty Shades), mystery (Gone Girl) and domestic intrigue (Girl on a Train). And now, with Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, loneliness.

It’s not the most obvious of themes for a literary sensation, but on Monday night, Eleanor Oliphant author Gail Honeyman received the highly coveted Book of the Year gong at the British Book Awards for her dazzling debut.

Her gentle dissection of modern isolation has already won the Costa First Novel, been translated into 30 languages, and the film rights have been bought by none other than Reese Witherspoon.

“I’m speechless, struck dumb,” Scottish-born Honeyman tells me, moments after receiving this latest trophy at a glitzy London ceremony.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this would happen. I’ll probably wake up one morning in three years’ time and finally discover I’ve processed it.”

On stage, the 44-year-old former civil servant announced that the only phrases she could think of were cliches. But instead of saying them anyway, as many (many) of her peers would have done, she simply murmured a sincere thank you, and graciously let the wave of applause wash over her.

Honeyman, glamorously Junoesque in a green gown, blonde hair expensively blow dried, is not one for talking about herself. She is warm and friendly when engaged on other subjects, but visibly squirms at even the most cursory of personal questions.

I find myself asking if she shares any traits with her fictional creation? Eleanor, after all, is fiercely protective of her private life. She immediately demurs.

“Eleanor Oliphant isn’t me, or anyone I know,” she says, firmly. “Of course I’ve felt loneliness – everybody does – but Eleanor and her experiences are fictional.”

Healey was working in university administration when, on the cusp of a milestone birthday, she took stock of her life.

“When you approach 40 you start to think about the things you haven’t done and the things you want to do,” she says. “As a little girl I used to write stories but by my teenage years I got out of the habit. I’ve always remained an avid reader and so I decided to write a few chapters and see where it led me.”

It would lead her to enter a writing competition that only required three chapters by way of a submission. She didn’t win, but one of the judges was an agent who immediately spotted Honeyman’s potential.

“I felt very buoyed by having someone who believed in me, and because I was still working full time, I started writing in every spare moment; in a cafe scribbling notes on a page of A4, on train journeys, at home on my computer.”

Honeyman has now given up her day job and work is underway on her second novel – another subject on which she won’t be drawn. Relationships, hobbies, even where in France she lived for a year of her studies – all similarly off limits, she apologises.

And so instead (and not without a certain irony) we talk about Eleanor Oliphant, the taciturn heroine of her novel, who is also a rather singular woman.

A prickly, awkward type in uncompromisingly unfashionable clothes, Eleanor has created a world that is tiny, ordered, structured just-so. She goes to work, comes home and spends entire weekends without speaking to a soul; just her, a Tesco pizza and a couple of bottles of vodka.

Isolation and dislocation are not the most attractive of qualities; in truth, most of us instinctively shrink away from them.

As Eleanor herself so trenchantly puts it in a rare moment of self-awareness: “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.”

Yet her journey from misfit to something – someone – different is compelling. Since Honeyman first embarked on her novel, the scourge of loneliness has risen higher up the social and political agenda than ever before.

The Jo Cox Loneliness Commission report last year called on the government to devise a national strategy to combat a condition that affects around nine million people in the UK and is as harmful to health, say medical experts, as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

“I’d love to claim some sort of prescience, but it’s just coincidence,” admits Honeyman, adding that “if I’ve helped fuel the debate on loneliness in some small way, that is wonderful.”

Since January we’ve even had the appointment of a minister for loneliness, although it seems uncomfortably significant that nobody can quite remember her name.

Despite the title of Honeyman’s book, Eleanor Oliphant is not Completely Fine. Far from it.

“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE.” Eleanor tells herself. “You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days.” 

Unable to interpret social cues and inappropriately judgemental, Eleanor speaks with a stilted formality entirely at odds with a woman in her 30s. My supposition was that, like Saga Noren from the Scandi Noir series The Bridge, she suffered from Asperger’s. Not so.

“Eleanor isn’t anywhere on the spectrum,” says Honeyman. “She is the product of nurture, not nature; traumatic events in her childhood have shaped her. But I was really keen not to portray her as tragic or a victim; she has agency and the power to make her own decisions.

“She’s not a particularly likeable character, certainly at the start,” Honeyman says. “Other people in the book find her very strange because they don’t have access to her interior thoughts, which do follow a certain logic.”

Having read the novel months ago, I was struck by the very different responses from friends who had also read it. Some found it hilarious. On visiting someone in hospital, Eleanor muses: “I looked in the fridge, and popped a packet of cheese slices into the bag. All men like cheese.”

Others found it heartbreaking. “I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person’s hand holding mine,” she says at one point.

“I wanted it to be funny,” says Honeyman. “There are very dark times but in the darkest moments humour always emerges.”

She was conscious, however, of allowing the laughs to come at Eleanor’s expense, and as such, the character’s redemption feels entirely realistic. She develops a crush on a pop star, encounters an old man collapsed on a road, is befriended very gradually by Raymond, a work colleague; she begins to understand how the world works, how to fit in, how to reach out.

“Was this how it worked, then, successful social integration?” she asks rhetorically. “Wear some lipstick, go to the hairdressers and alternate the clothes you wear?”

Like Honeyman, we empathise with Eleanor and grow to like her, too. “There are no dramatic acts of valour, nobody sweeps in and saves [her],” she says. “Little gestures enable her to save herself. We can all fight against loneliness by engaging in random acts of kindness.”

Truly, if everyone who has read the book were to do just that, who can guess what impact it could have?

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is published by Harper Collins Publishers (£12.99). To order your copy for £10.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk