Her darkly comic debut about a 20-something dealing with divorce is set to be one of the most talked-about books of the year, with fans including Dolly Alderton and Rob Delaney. The writer talks about how art really does imitate life.
When Maggie and her husband, Jon, decided to geta divorce, she had noble intentions. She would be kind to her ex, like in Hollywood films where a beautiful woman, usually played by Diane Keaton, learns to love herself again and meets a silver fox. But all the women in these films were older (and successful enough to drown their sorrows with expensive white wine). There were no films about people like Maggie, getting divorced aged 28, unable to afford the rent on her flat alone and too mortified to tell her friends that after her lavish wedding, what was meant to last until death us do part had been outlasted by the warranty on her sofa.
This is the premise of Monica Heisey’s debut novel, Really Good, Actually, and is set to be one of the most talked-about books of the year. Rob Delaney and Dolly Alderton have praised Heisey’s wit and compassion, while Marian Keyes calls it “alarmingly relatable”. It tells the story of Maggie’s first year after her divorce: navigating dating apps, her fear of being alone, and living in a society where women are judged on their relationship status. Maggie feels like a failure and no one can say the right thing to her — from her male colleague who tells her “no good marriage ends in divorce” to her aunt who welcomes her into a “sacred sisterhood of jilted wives”.
“I borrowed quite heavily from my own emotions,” says Heisey, 34. Like Maggie, Heisey got divorced at 28. She and her ex-husband, who is older, had known each other since she was a teenager. They met through mutual friends in Toronto, where she grew up. Heisey came to London to do a master’s degree in Shakespearean literature at King’s College London and has lived between London and Canada since, with a spell working as a screenwriter on Schitt’s Creek.
I meet Heisey in South London on the set of her latest project, a television show she has written about a woman who falls in love only to find out that her new boyfriend has a 6-year-old daughter. “It’s about fitting into someone’s life when they have so much life established already,” Heisey says. Aisling Bea plays the girl’s mother and it is due to be released later this year.
Heisey is sitting cross-legged on a double bed. She smooths back her long, curly red hair and tells me how she had the idea that became Really Good, Actually in 2016, just after she got married and was thinking about relationships. The idea didn’t crystallise until after her divorce, but she held off spilling her heart on to the page until her emotions were less raw, starting the novel just before the pandemic.
“I wanted to wait until it wouldn’t be therapeutic,” she says. “If I’d written it in the midst of my own heartbreak, it would have been a different novel. Hindsight enabled me to take the piss — taking things that happened to me and making them funnier or more humiliating. Maggie is living the worst-case scenario — what if I had stayed in Toronto, which is so small, what if I hadn’t been going to therapy already, if I was a little less self-aware?”
Has she shown her ex the book or does she know if he is planning to read it? “No and I don’t know. It has been five years and I live in another country. I’m not sure it’s my business.” She pauses. “If he wrote a book, I would definitely read it.”
Heisey thinks we are uncomfortable with break-ups because they have similarities to grief “and people are uncomfortable with things going wrong”. After her divorce she says the best thing was a friend making her “these crispy, buttery potatoes and saying it was going to be fine. Not now, but for now, let’s have potatoes.”
Since she announced the book, she has been inundated with breakup stories. “Every heartbreak story is both so personal and so universal at the same time. That’s what’s funny about heartbreak — it feels like this life-ending catastrophe, but it will happen to everyone a couple of times in their life. It’s like bad flu — it feels like the end of the world, but you know you are going to survive it.”
Maggie’s friends give her what Heisey calls “a truly Olympic level of care”. Heisey herself has been going to a therapist since she was 24, “to help me not exhaust my friends. Because divorce is a roller coaster — some days you might feel like it is the best decision you ever made and you are doing great, and then it can be devastating, it feels like the worst decision you ever made and you are going to die alone.”
In the novel, Maggie’s answer is to go on a dating app odyssey to prove to herself that other people will find her attractive (and provide a reality check from her fantasies about bumping into her ex with her new boyfriend, Harry Styles). The many people she meets are thrilled to meet a young divorcee, there’s a character who doesn’t wear shoes, an alarming number of them are thinking of getting into stand-up comedy and none of them has curtains. “The apps are useful because they remind you that there are single people around,” Heisey says. “But I don’t think they are the best we can do.”
She met her boyfriend of four years “in the wild”, at a birthday party. They live in East London with their black and white cat, Shrimp. Her boyfriend is an editor and has read her novel twice: “He’s a real trouper, he has heard every joke 40,000 times.”
Would she get married again? “Everyone asks that. It’s an exciting idea, strapping in for this big crazy adventure,” she begins, not saying no — she says she is “a romantic” — but explaining that it would be different. “My idea of romance has changed. It’s a lot more personal, less guided by the parties everyone else is having or the thing everyone recognises as romance. If you’re younger, it feels like you have changed something by getting married, but I don’t think it would now.”
Really Good, Actually, by Monica Heisey. Photo / Supplied
When she was a child, she and her two older sisters (who are now nurses, like Maggie’s in the book) would plan their fantasy wedding dresses.
“I grew up watching romantic comedies and they all end in a wedding,” she says. “I like the idea of really trying to be with someone long-term. But it is funny how the world is set up for married couples — when you say ‘my husband and I’, you suddenly feel more responsible.
“We’ve made marriage an appealing proposition — you wear nice clothes, people give you money. If more people had big 30th birthday parties we’d have a lot fewer weddings and divorces.” On a serious note, at a time when houses are so expensive and salaries frequently low and jobs precarious, “marriage is one of the last hallmarks of traditional adulthood that’s accessible to us in our 20s”.
Maggie’s other big relationship is with her body, obsessively trying to gain some sense of control over her life by going on fasting diets and to spin classes. “It wouldn’t be an accurate portrayal of a millennial woman in crisis without some food and body stuff hitting the fan,” says Heisey, who says she wanted Maggie to look like her even though friends warned her people would then assume it was her life. “No matter how far along in the process of body positivity you are, those scabs are always there and during periods of crisis it is tempting and quite easy to pick them off and reopen those wounds, for reasons of control or self-flagellation. And there is nothing more depressing than low-calorie desserts.”
We break off for Heisey to give her feedback on a scene where the woman in the show, Sammy (Danielle Vitalis who played the young Michaela Coel in I May Destroy You), comes home drunk and her boyfriend (Jon Pointing) has made her a sandwich so she doesn’t eat the one he has made for his daughter’s packed lunch. “She needs to have excited eyes when she sees the sandwich,” Heisey says. Pointing is wearing a white cable-knit jumper “inspired by When Harry Met Sally, which I watch every month, it’s like part of my menstrual cycle”, Heisey says.
Working on the show is a change from the big-budget Schitt’s Creek, where she was part of a writers’ room. “It’s fun and scary. Everyone comes with ideas and you morph them into something together — you’ve got all these juicy brains in one room. Writing for Catherine O’Hara, who plays Moira Rose, was a dream come true.” No one knew the show would be such a hit when they were making it, although Heisey had faith in the co-creator Dan Levy’s “vision”.
There are already plans to adapt Really Good, Actually for television. The book is all told from Maggie’s point of view and Heisey is looking forward to “developing her friends more as characters”. Who would play Maggie? “There are so few size 16 actresses, so it will be an interesting challenge — maybe Florence Pugh will bravely gain 30 pounds.”
Above all, she has written the sort of book she was “desperate” to read when she was going through a divorce. “I wanted a book that acknowledged that it is hard and sad but also that it is also a bit ridiculous. I hope people find it funny. As the writer Sheila Heti says, ‘You need to know where the funny is — and if you know that, you know everything.’”
Five hot reads for 2023
Maame, by Jessica George
The Londoner Jessica George’s debut novel centres on Maddie, a British-Ghanaian woman trying to make it in a creative industry where she never feels quite welcome. To top it off, she faces suffocating expectations at home with a father with Parkinson’s and an absent mother. Sold in an eight-way auction, Maame has been tipped as one of the must-reads of the year.
Big Swiss, by Jen Beagin
Greta has an unusual job. She transcribes sessions for the sex therapist Om, giving her an insight into the bedroom antics of many people in the town, one of whom she encounters in real life. Brilliantly funny, this is the New York-based Jen Beagin’s third novel, and while her first two received critical acclaim, this one looks likely to break through to a wider audience. A TV adaptation starring Jodie Comer is in the works.
Ordinary Human Failings, by Megan Nolan
Nolan is a former columnist and her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, put her on the shortlist for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. She’s back with a new novel set in 1990s London about a tabloid reporter who has stumbled upon a brilliant scoop. Given Nolan’s previous form, this is set to be electric.
The Three of Us, by Ore Agbaje-Williams
When your friends hate your boyfriend, it’s a vibrant red flag. And when the relationship inevitably ends, the communal bitching can be hugely healing. But what if it doesn’t end? What if you get married and your best friend and husband detest each other? That’s the problem at the heart of this debut novel, set over one day and written during lockdown. I’m told it was fought over in a very heated auction.
Romantic Comedy, by Curtis Sittenfeld
Biting, pacy and great fun, Curtis Sittenfeld’s novels — American Wife, Rodham — are some of the most original to come from America in recent years. Her latest is about Sally, a single but (relatively) happy woman who writes sketches for a late-night Saturday live comedy show. This is Sittenfeld’s seventh and it’s set to be as searing and funny as the rest.
