Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Length: 384 pages
Audiobook Length: 10 hours and 13 minutes
First Published: 2023
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Rachael’s Review
Even though Maggie and her husband have been together since they were teens, they find themselves divorcing less than two years after their wedding. Although she pretends everything is fine, Maggie is a hot mess. With observant sarcasm, Heisey narrates Maggie’s self-destruction thoughts and cringeworthy choices as she painfully learns to take care of herself.
Although Heisey’s clever observations made me laugh at times, Really, Good Actually wasn’t really that good. As a protagonist, Maggie is hard to love; she’s an over-the-top hot mess who has no concept of how the world actually works. Her constant poor decision-making gets a bit old and the plot rambled so much that I didn’t even notice when my audiobook skipped a chapter or two in the middle. The only saving grace was Heisey’s witty writing and hilarious one-liners.
Publisher’s Description
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™.
Now she has time to take up nine hobbies, eat hamburgers at 4 am, and “get back out there” sex-wise. With the support of her tough-loving academic advisor, Merris; her newly divorced friend, Amy; and her group chat (naturally), Maggie barrels through her first year of single life, intermittently dating, occasionally waking up on the floor and asking herself tough questions along the way.
Laugh-out-loud funny and filled with sharp observations, Really Good, Actually is a tender and bittersweet comedy that lays bare the uncertainties of modern love, friendship, and our search for that thing we like to call “happiness”. This is a remarkable debut from an unforgettable new voice in fiction.
About Monica Heisey
Monica Heisey is an essayist, comedian, and screenwriter. She is also the author of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better and Really Good, Actually. Originally from Toronto, Heisey currently lives in London. Visit the author’s website →
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