Fiction is remarkably effective at provoking certain reactions and remarkably ham-fisted when it comes to others. Dozens of novels have probably flooded you with feelings of heartbreak or compassion, but few might have made you feel the urgent, rage-quiet terror of a young woman in turmoil the way Really Good, Actually does. “The main thing I wanted to do was paint an accurate picture of a woman in crisis,” its author, Monica Heisey, says from her home in London, “because we put so much pressure on ourselves and are so used to feeling observed and to performing – being fine for other people in a way that’s been made much more intense because of social media. And I think, for most of us these days, if you’re going insane, you’re doing it digitally as well as in real life.”
Really Good, Actually follows Maggie, a 29-year-old PhD student who is newly separated from her husband after 608 days of marriage. Although she’s determined to embrace this next chapter of her life, the book focuses more on Maggie’s thoughts and feelings than on what she intends to do, or not do, next. “The whole novel is a woman realising that she has her shit significantly less together than she thought and almost that she had been, like, allowed to feel that she was a grown-up because she had done this one thing, this one incredibly socially rewarded thing,” Heisey says. “And then the slow realisation that, maybe, it didn’t mean much for her maturity level, or her emotional intelligence or whatever else that she tethered to this one thing.” Her marriage certificate “is just a piece of paper. You know, it doesn’t even say anything about the quality of the relationship with the person. You’re just married, and that’s not special.”
Readers might initially curl up with the book, savouring the rich relatability of the writing, before sweating a little as Heisey’s prose, which unfurls both in paragraph-long sentences and in clipped lists, lures them into danger zones: rose-tinted memories, traumatic shame, paralysing heartbreak and loss.
It’s also a funny book, which shouldn’t be surprising, given that Heisey is also a comedy writer – her CV includes the Emmy-winning Schitt’s Creek. (Heisey’s lineage comes by way of the McCormacks and Mulligans of Monaghan. “I read somewhere that the countries with the best sense of humour are the ones with the worst weather,” she says. “Makes sense.”) Heisey gives Maggie’s dialogue lilt and spin; the extended monologues in which the author sends her protagonist into a mundane rapture, anticipating a grim and closeted future, are highlights of the book.
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Like Maggie, Heisey, who is Canadian, got divorced at 28, after a short marriage to a man with whom she had been romantically linked since her teens. They, too, had to decide who got the cat. She knew people would assume Really Good, Actually was autobiographical, “which is why I didn’t bother to make Maggie and I physically dissimilar”, she says. “Because I wanted to get into body image and stuff, and I thought the simplest way to do that would be to write about a body that felt familiar to me. Honestly, I kind of made peace with the fact that people would assume it was a documentary I made about my life. Certainly that’s what my mom thinks. But once I started writing, and found the ways that Maggie and I overlapped and the ways that we diverged, I felt very comfortable. Because the story and the events in the story are totally fictional.
“And, really, Maggie’s like a container for all of these emotions that I had during the divorce. She’s almost a nightmare version of what the divorce would have been like if I hadn’t had any healthy coping mechanisms or, in a lot of ways, if I had given in to certain impulses. Like, what if I had called every time I wanted to call, you know? Those sorts of impulses, though, are very relatable; the amount that you want to see someone and the amount that you crave a kind of ‘closure’ that you know, intellectually, you’re not going to get.”
Amid the dark humour, Really Good, Actually reads like a true map of the human condition – the modern female one, anyway – with hints of Girls-like reality checks and Sally Field-adjacent yearning
Really Good, Actually has a pointed take on the emotional toll of a life spent online. Heisey, a Twitter stalwart, is acutely attuned to the outer edges of such an existence, with all the animosity, shame and anxiety it can engender. She is also attuned to what she calls the relationship conveyor belt. “It’s just this social privileging of, particularly, heterosexual love over any other life achievement or source of happiness that any of us have, particularly for women,” she says.
“So it’s like the best thing you can do for yourself is get a boyfriend. And once you have a boyfriend it would be better if he was your fiance, then if he was your husband, then the father of your kids. I remember my first book came out around the same time I got engaged. And everyone I would run into would say congratulations, and while I thought they were talking about the book, this lifelong dream I’d had, every one of them meant the engagement to my partner, who I’d already been with for seven years.”
What sticks in the mind about Really Good, Actually is not just its general air of panic, humour and self-blame (for an example of which, consider that Heisey and I both apologise for being late to our Zoom call, but in fact we’re both on time). It’s also that, amid the dark humour, it reads like a true map of the human condition – the modern female one, anyway – with hints of Girls-like reality checks and Sally Field-adjacent yearning. What’s her next move? “I have a show coming out that we filmed last year,” she says, brushing Pre-Raphaelite curls from her face as she smiles. “It’s called Smothered, and it’s a romantic comedy.”
Really Good, Actually is published in paperback by 4th Estate
