Hi fellow readers, has a Book made you down? While reading it you can feel its tiring energy?

For me, it’s Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey, so far this year.

It has its good points. It has thought provoking quotes and it’s relatable in some ways. But overall it made me down.

This book is not for me but I like Monica Heisey’s writing. Weird? Or makes sense? Read Monica Heisey’s quotes down below to see what I mean. MH beautifully writes Maggie’s situation that it’s powerful and relatable and you’d be like, “yes! That’s exactly how I feel” when you can’t express your feelings right.

Just imagine a friend of yours who cannot stop talking about a certain person or event in their life and it’s becoming tiring listening to their story and being around them.

That’s how I felt reading this book. I want to finish this Really Good, Actually but reading Maggie’s thoughts and events in her life got tiring. I felt like a bad friend who wants to support my friend from afar so I won’t absorb their exhausting energy.

And I felt guilting getting tired of reading this book because Maggie is going through a difficult time and I want to be there for her but I felt my energy becoming heavier as I read her words.

Marian Keyes and Dolly Alderton found Really Good, Actually wildly funny and hilarious, respectively.

I simply found it funny ha!, not funny haha! Except for the part where Maggie fantasizes about Harry Styles. That part was funny haha! for me.

Do Jon and Maggie get back together?
No. In the end Maggie signs the divorce papers like it’s nothing. Implying she has moved on. Good for her. I didn’t really think they would get back together since this is not a romance book. But I did want Jon to make an appearance or say something before the book ends. And he does in chapter 15. He doesn’t want to get back together and he knows Maggie had sex with Calvin.

What happens to Simon?
I like Simon. It’s an open ending between Maggie and Simon. Simon asks Maggie on a date. Maggie says no because she’s working on herself with Helen, her therapist. Simon tells Maggie to call him if she changes her mind. They end the phone call ok. Simon also texts Maggie on her birthday and greets her. I really like Simon. He seems like a genuinely nice guy.

Words by Monica Heisey that I want to share with others

So here I am sharing them with you.

“I feel like when you get a divorce, everyone’s wondering how you ruined it all, what made you so unbearable to be with. If your husband dies, at least people feel bad for you.”

“I unhappily bear the fruit of my own destruction,’ a chestnut tree said after being shaken by some children. It was disorienting to find that this, too, was about me, a voice reaching across centuries and an ocean to say, sorry about your divorce.”

“One day and it will surprise you how soon this day will come, but one day you will wake up and feel good. It won’t last long, but then you’ll have another day where you barely remember this abjection, and another, and another, until that’s just your life. But for now, it will be hard. This is the part that’s hard.”

“There were, as promised, many more fish in the sea. Lots of these fish were even attractive.”

“Meeting new people felt like starting over: daunting and depressing, a challenge for someone fallen on romantic hard times. Reconnecting with paths not taken was easier and seemed more purposeful. These were the people my relationship had been holding me back from being with! The right ones were there all along! It was comforting to think that being with Jon had been the mistake, not losing him or letting him go. If I was supposed to be with one of these near-flames of my past, then breaking it off with my husband had been an important step toward finding real love, instead of what it usually felt like: a failure.”

“Dating has a way of making incompatibility feel like personal failure”

“The last time I’d felt like this I married the man, so had assumed the experience was unique to finding one’s soul mate. But here it was, more or less the same, with some guy I’d found in a bar: the tension and warmth and sense of shared momentum. The feeling of being looked at, of wanting to look at someone more than I wanted to do anything else. The sudden realisation that this human being is in possession, somehow, of the best and nicest brain, the warmest torso, the sexiest legs. The follow-up realisation that you’re into men’s legs now, that this person has made that so. I 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.”

“I knew if I saw my friends I would have to care about their lives in return, and I simply … did not.”

“If it wasn’t Simon, now, it would be somebody else someday, and wasn’t that insane? I would have to figure out how to love them without freaking out, and some small part of me would have to believe that it was real. More outrageous than this was the possibility that one day, it might be.”

“I thought about next year, how I had no idea what it would be like, who I would meet, what they would do. Things would happen to me, and I would make decisions, and sometimes they would work out and sometimes they wouldn’t. It would carry on like that, over and over, until ideally, I got incredibly old and died in my sleep, maybe with somebody nice nearby, or a cat that would definitely eat part of my face, but what would I care, I’d be drifting around in that endless nothing space I could not think about for too long without becoming sweat-drenched and queasy. It was a funny idea, my existing for years and years, shit happening all over the place, everything seeming so Big and Meaningful. And it was, but also it wasn’t. I would feel one way for a while, and then I would feel another way, and it would never be forever, because nothing is.”

This book reminded me of Listen to the Marriage. It’s also a tiring book to read. Books about divorce/separation are tiring to read.

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