Really Good, Actually : A Novel

A hilarious and painfully relatable debut novel about one young woman’s messy journey to find joy in the wake of a devastating breakup, from comedian, essayist, and award-winning screenwriter Monica Heisey.

Maggie is fine. She’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s broke, her graduate thesis on something obscure is going nowhere, and her marriage only lasted 608 days (not that she’s counting) . . . but at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new life as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée™.

Now she has time to take up nine hobbies, eat hamburgers at 4 am, and “get back out there” sex-wise. With the support of her tough-loving academic advisor, Merris; her newly divorced friend, Amy; and her group chat (naturally), Maggie barrels through her first year of singledom, intermittently dating, and asking tough questions along the way.

Laugh-out-loud funny and filled with sharp observations, Really Good, Actually is a surprisingly tender and bittersweet anti-romantic comedy that lays bare the uncertainties of modern love and friendship and that thing we like to call “happiness”—and marks the debut of an unforgettable new voice.

Hardcover

By Monica Heisey