Review: Really Good, Actually, by Monica Heisey

By Simon Demetriou

Someone who wrote for Schitt’s Creek should know a thing or two about turning a devastating life event into comedy. In Really Good, Actually, Monica Heisey turns her attentions to divorce rather than financial disaster, and to entitled middle-class millennials rather than entitled wealthy millennials and baby boomers.

Maggie is a part-time research assistant working on a PhD about ‘the “lived history of objects” in early modern theatre’. Aged 29, she has spent the best part of a decade with Jon, yet finds herself alone following a marriage that lasted only 608 days. With this come a number of witty and perceptive realisations: ‘The warranty on history’s worst sofa had outlasted our marriage’; ‘it did not feel better to burn a tobacco and juniper candle and listen to the Backstreet Boys than it had felt to be loved’; ‘In marriage I had traded in my essential traits for a series of comparisons: I was the Cranky One, the Bookish One, the One Who Cares If The Towels Are Damp’.

Ultimately, Heisey does an effective job of bringing out the tragi-comic messiness of divorce in the real world when you don’t have the good fortune of being ‘a beautiful middle-aged Diane who is her own boss and knows about the good kind of white wine’, but are instead a woman ‘tired of waiting for my exact body type (innkeeper’s wife in bawdy eighteenth-century cartoon) to come into fashion’. In the real world of Really Good, Actually, dealing with divorce becomes a self-damaging exercise in Twitter fabrications and nastinesses, developing a level of self-indulgent neediness that makes your friends find you insufferable, taking solace in dating-app matches and social media likes, and crying in basements.

You can tell by the level of quotation in this review that there is a lot to like about Heisey’s novel on the level of phrase, sentence, paragraph – even chapter. Indeed, the best bit is a chapter dedicated to a dream that culminates in the ex-husband offering to shake Harry Styles’ hand, only to be told, ‘Better not, mate… I’ve spent all morning fingering your wife.’

But Really Good, Actually is not a really good novel. It’s well observed and sharply written – and it would make a very good TV series. But the witticisms get repetitive, and the emotional pitch really never changes, so despite the pithy language, the book feels over-long and one-dimensional. Ultimately, to get the most out if it, Really Good, Actually is a better book to dip in and out of for a quick comedy fix rather than one to read in a few long sittings. You’ll get plenty of laughs either way, though.

Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey is published by HarperCollins.