Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over. 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.”

Almost every time Heisey comes close to a serious idea about Maggie’s inner turmoil – she also went through divorce as a twentysomething – it’s bookended with a deadpan quip. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism. i would compare this book to a mixture of ADELAIDE and ROMANTIC COMEDY but tbh i liked it a lot more. i believe i read somewhere that it was being adapted into a movie or series and i think it would translate very well! Maggie, the 29-year-old heroine of Schitt’s Creek screenwriter Monica Heisey’s effortlessly readable debut novel, is trying to work out why her marriage has ended.

Books Multibuys

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. Maggie’s marriage is ending only six hundred and eight days after it began (despite being together nearly a decade) . . .

This book made me feel like the boy in Matilda who is forced by Principal Trunchbull to eat that entire chocolate cake. At first you think, oh yay cake. I enjoy this. But then you realize you are forcing yourself through more of the same with no new development until you are ready to just explode. It is much easier to digest in a more bite sized portions. You know those miserable friends you avoid at all costs? This book was like being forced to listen to one for 5 hours straight. Painful.

Recommended by Los Angeles Times • Washington Post • GQ• Elle • Good Morning America • People • Guardian • The Times • E! News Online • The Globe and Mail • Toronto Star • The Week • New York Post • Shondaland • and many more! Vacillating between the cringe-worthy/second-hand embarrassment-fueled moments of a person with no self-awareness.. and absolute heart-wrenching grief and denial... this story is hard to read. Somewhat in a good way, somewhat in a bad way? It's categorized as a novel, but most definitely makes you wonder how much of was real for the author. A hilarious and painfully relatable debut novel about one woman’s messy search for joy and meaning in the wake of an unexpected breakup, from comedian, essayist, and award-winning screenwriter Monica Heisey

Maggie is fine. She’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s broke, her graduate thesis on something obscure is going nowhere, and her marriage only lasted 608 days, but at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new life as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée™. 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. 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 author has my attention at the start with the opening section which is really good but then she loses me. Whilst there are some laughs and also some heartache I struggle to get through this. Of the 43 most stressful events that an average adult might contend with in their lifetime, “divorce” and “marital separation” rank at Nos 2 and 3 respectively, grimly sandwiched between “spousal death” and “imprisonment”. (“Vacations” and “frequency of family reunions” make the list too – useful to remember in the wake of the holiday season.) It’s a nugget of popular psychology with which Maggie, the heroine of Monica Heisey’s debut novel, Really Good, Actually, would be familiar. rating — rating up — because I can understand that some people (maybe need to be in the goofy mood or YOUNGER than 70 years and 11 months old) ….. 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.