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

Product Information

You know how every funny book about a single woman who is a ‘bit of mess’ is compared to Bridget Jones? Well, comparatively? Bridget: step aside babes. In the movies, you are Diane Lane, or Keaton, or possibly Kruger, a beautiful middle-aged Diane who is her own boss and knows about the good kind of white wine. Usually, you do not continue living with your ex for weeks because you can’t make the rent on your dusty one-bedroom apartment alone. Generally, you are not a glorified research assistant and an advertising copywriter, respectively, whose most important shared financial asset is your one friend who always gets free phones from work. Certainly, you are not supposed to be twenty-eight years old and actively planning a birthday party with the dress code “Jimmy Buffett sluts.” Maggie has been married for less than two years when her and her husband decide to get a divorce. Now Maggie is in her late 20s and single and trying to figure her life out after everything has been turned upside down. Kind of. He’d moved out, taking the cat (for now) and a gaming system and three acoustic guitars. The idea of Jon writing breakup songs in some dark sublet filled me with equal parts deep despair and incredible relief—despair, to think that I had caused him such pain he’d been driven to experimental songwriting; relief, that I wouldn’t have to listen to it. The whole thing is a bit of a ramble, really. We’re with Maggie and she’s spiralling and then not spiralling and then spiralling some more. It’s fun and relatable in a chaotic sort of way which is realistic if you think about it. There’s plenty introspection and the kind of deep thought that happens when your life is collapsing. Plenty drama. It would make for light (?) reading. At least to me, it was light ish. I recommend.

Call it what you must, but you need to practise walking around and living life and being heartbroken at the same time. Not in an exciting way, where you're in the thrall of some new person, or buying something outrageous, or terrorising Jiro, but in the way where you still have to go to work when you have a toothache.’ Laugh-out-loud funny, razor sharp and painfully relatable, Really Good, Actually is an irresistible debut novel about the uncertainties of modern love, friendship and happiness from a stunning new voice in fiction, Monica Heisey. People in general were very keen to suggest I hang out with other people they knew who'd divorced before they'd gotten gray hair. Sometimes it felt like a gesture of support, and sometimes it felt like loading Maggie’s marriage has ended just 608 days after it started, but she’s fine – she’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s alone for the first time in her life, can’t afford her rent and her obscure PhD is going nowhere . . . but at the age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new status as a Surprisingly Young DivorcéeTM.Maggie’s marriage is ending only six hundred and eight days after it began (despite being together nearly a decade) . . . Maggie is a 29 year old struggling to come to terms with a fresh divorce and for some reason has zero self restraint. She is endlessly cringey; constantly acting poorly and saying awful things to her friends. I’m surprised her friends didn’t fall out with her sooner. First of all, the positives as I see them. The premise is a creative one and I do enjoy the new chaotic life Maggie now lives though the standout feature that appeals to me the most is the ironic, sarcastic tone and the social commentary. The friendships are good and there are some scenes that are entertaining as Maggie employs a multitude of diversionary tactics. The Google searches she does a funny too! The spirited, often sarcastic tone with which Heisey describes these events is heavily indebted to social media: “Then I went to a hypnotist who told me to imagine being beautiful in a bathing suit and I was cured, just kidding.” I think the problem with this book is that it’s not in its ideal format. This would have worked a lot better as a short story/essay collection. As a novel, it drags and meanders without a real sense of purpose or plot. Nothing really moves forward and it feels like a collection of comedy routines on a shared topic. The zany one liners also work a lot better in that medium I think. With this being a full length novel, endless jokes about the same topic get tiring.

Really Good, Actually opens with the line My marriage ended because I was cruel and the narrator Maggie continues with a list of reasons her marriage ended. With an opening like that, it can only go downhill, and that it did. We meet twenty-nine year old Maggie reeling from a divorce from her college sweetheart. They have been dating for a long time and finally got married, the marriage only lasted 608 days. Now Maggie must navigate a new world, single, broke, emotionally erratic and trying to find out who she is outside of the world she created with her ex-husband. Well this was a darkly comical and often times tragically relatable read. Maggie’s marriage has ended just 608 days after it started, but she’s fine - really good, actually. Or is she? She seems to be embracing her aloneness and navigating the anxiety and unknown of her first year of divorce by throwing herself into new hobbies, dating, saying whatever comes into her head (over sharing x 💯!) and getting horribly drunk with her new divorced friend Amy. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism. This book is like someone's intrusive thoughts gone rogue. lol... I think I liked it more in the end because the character grew so much? But during that, I was constantly trying to hide from the cringy parts while simultaneously laughing at the absolute absurdity of some of it. From the rating alone, it’s obvious this was NOT for everyone, but oh how I loved it. There’s nothing like making an imperfect fictional friend and this was another example of a “romdramedy” that had me laughing out loud one minute and “bless your heart”-ing Maggie the next.I’d never considered how the taboo surrounding divorce (until much more recently) has meant that nearly all divorcee pop culture references have typically centred around middle-aged people who have families or homes that need to be divided and negotiated. Really Good, Actually provides a completely different perspective as Maggie and her ex have no children (but there is a cat), they don’t own their home, and they have no shared belongings. She’s also at the stage in her life where everyone around her is either newly engaged or about to get married, just as she’s coming to terms with her marriage coming to an end. The first to get married in her friendship group and now the first to get divorced, you can imagine Maggie’s internal struggle with coming to terms with her new reality. And we also hear about the hotly anticipated book coming next month in our Editors' Tip from Dialogue's Hannah Chukwu