really good, actually by monica heisey

THe evening standard 18 january 2023

Monica Heisey – who spent a spell as a screenwriter on cult sitcom Schitt’s Creek – has written her first novel called Really Good, Actually which has been praised for its wit by everyone from Rob Delaney to Dolly Alderton. Marian Keyes described it as “WILDLY funny and almost alarmingly relatable”.

The narrator is a 28-year-old PhD student called Maggie who lives in Toronto and decides to end her marriage to her husband Jon after 608 days. As she says, “I hadn’t lost my husband, I had left him. Or, rather, I had suggested he leave, and he had taken me up on this incredibly quickly. In many ways it was the last thing we agreed on.”

Heisey who herself got divorced at the same age, describes Maggie as looking like her and with the same postgraduate qualification in Shakespearean literature (a friend of Maggie’s describes her job as “you … explain Macbeth”) but Heisey has said that she wrote the book with enough distance for it not to be about her own experience.

Maggie is needy and occasionally pitiful, regularly ordering burgers at 4am that she pretends are for her non-existent dog. She nonetheless endearingly regards her own attempts at self-care with ironic detachment, not least when she reflects – after her husband leaves – that she “tried almost aggressively to let the soft animal of my body love what it loved, which mostly at that point was potatoes.” Her friends are indulgent, although many of them mention kintsugi – the Japanese philosophy of repairing breaking things by incorporating the break in the repair, rather than attempting to disguise it. She arranges all these kintsugi-promoting messages as a list – Maggie loves lists. Her father sends her a daily text: “alive y/n”.

This kind of self-deprecating character is harder to write than it looks: our heroine needs to be authentically hopeless enough to be relatable but without straying into behaviour that is so desperate it sounds like a form of self-harm. I wasn’t always sure Heisey maintained this balance and my heart sank when Maggie meets a man who is both kind and sexy but she “knew, of course, that eventually I would reveal the part of myself that made him recoil, and he would go, and I’d be despondent, so for now I was just trying to enjoy the view.” It helps, however, that Maggie has a winning line in sexual bravado, for example observing of an ostensibly straight woman she takes home with her, “who told me she ‘never did this’; I got the impression she never did this a lot.” At a wedding, she has a threesome which manages to be vaguely sexy, funny and humiliating all at once.

She moves into the basement suite of a colleague, a widow who shares a “large duplex in the east end with two other professors in a kind of highbrow Golden Girls situation” and her life gradually improves but Heisey cannily stops this from sounding like a fairytale transformation.

At the beginning of the book, Maggie is the archetypal extremely online millennial. Her first instinct on ending her marriage was to take a picture of her face and download Facetune so she could delete the dark circles beneath her eyes before she posted the picture online. The realisation that not every development in her life needs to, or should be, posted about almost seems to occur to her in real time and it becomes oddly moving. I don’t think it’s necessarily what Heisey was intending but the idea that we might be all be a little happier living our lives slightly less online, feels like a powerful message for the new year.

Heisey is a fan of romantic comedies and appears to be aiming at a Nora Ephron quality (she is a self-confessed fan) and often achieves it. The jokes – even the good ones – become wearing however, and I felt the book faltered as the narrative failed to develop. Maggie’s characterisation owes something to Lena Dunham’s Girls and, like the HBO series, one of the joys of Really Good, Actually is the warmth of the main character’s friendships.

Heisey has an original voice but I fear that this debut is a little overhyped and not even her rollicking wit can sustain its long narrative.

This review originally appeared in the Evening Standard