Reese's Book Club's Very First Pick Is A Laugh-Out-Loud Ode To Friendship

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This article contains spoilers for "Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine," by Gail Honeyman.

Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine. Or so she insists. With this flatly comic assertion, readers were introduced to a socially maladjusted office worker with a fondness for frozen pizza and routine — and also introduced, as it turns out, to Reese Witherspoon's literary ambitions. 

In May 2017, Gail Honeyman's debut novel, "Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine," was the inaugural selection for Reese's Book Club, an unassuming launchpad for what would become one of the most influential book-recommendation engines in contemporary publishing. This emotionally complex and woman-centered tale set the tone for a club that would go on to champion the stories of unfiltered, multi-dimensional women.

Our oddball heroine has no friends, no family she speaks to, and not even a pet to project affection onto. Her life unfolds according to a narrow, numbing routine. The office job is unremarkable, lunch is spent dissecting the newspaper, and dinner is taken in front of the radio. On Friday evenings, she stocks up on the essentials for a weekend of solitude (not least her usual supply of wine and vodka). She's startlingly formal, prone to speaking as if she's wandered out of a 1950s etiquette manual. But is she eccentric, or fundamentally adrift? The plot, such as it is, turns on her blossoming friendship with Raymond, a colleague from the IT department. In his gentle presence, the shape of her life begins to soften. From there, the world starts to seep in.

For a novel shaped by chronic loneliness, "Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine" moves with surprising buoyancy. Eleanor's voice is so out of step with the world that her observations lend the story an accidental wit. Reese Witherspoon recognized this balance right away. "Great Book Alert!! Beautifully written and INCREDIBLY funny," she said in her review of the book. 

Readers responded in kind. Securing its place as one of Reese's best literary fiction picks, the novel won the Costa First Novel Award. What's more, since its 2017 release, it has collected over 600,000 5-star reviews on Goodreads (with an average almost high enough to top the highest-rated Reese's Book Club pick of all time). 

"Eleanor Oliphant" is also poised to join a growing roster of picks from Reese's Book Club that made it to the screen. Witherspoon has built a media brand around her book club, which now serves as a strategic pipeline for her production company, Hello Sunshine. She acquired adaptation rights soon after the novel's publication, with MGM later signing on as a partner. So much of the story lives inside Eleanor's peculiar, emotionally blinkered narration. But Hello Sunshine has made a speciality of translating intimate, female-driven novels into commercially successful screen stories. This one is unlikely to be an exception.