Really Good, Actually: A Novel

"Hilarious, heart-warming, wise." - Paula Hawkins

A hilarious and painfully relatable debut novel about one woman's messy search for joy and meaning in the wake of an unexpected 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, 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 single life, intermittently dating, occasionally waking up on the floor and asking herself tough questions along the way.

Laugh-out-loud funny and filled with sharp observations, Really Good, Actually is a tender and bittersweet comedy that lays bare the uncertainties of modern love, friendship, and our search for that thing we like to call "happiness". This is a remarkable debut from an unforgettable new voice in fiction.

"Hilarious, heart-warming, wise."  - Paula Hawkins, author of A Slow Fire Burning

"Every sentence of Monica Heisey's writing is a treat. Her observations on men, women, friendship, family, love, sexuality and womanhood are equal parts hilarious and profound. No one makes me laugh like she does." - Dolly Alderton, bestselling author of Ghosts

"Monica Heisey is a very funny writer, which would be enough for me to recommend this book. But you have to remember: humor isn't a supplement to realism; it's a necessary component of it. Really Good, Actually may start out like a light-hearted not-so-romantic comedy, but it quickly transforms into something more tense and existential, a realistically absurd portrait of a woman who has no idea who she is or what is going on. And yeah, it's really funny."  - Lauren Oyler, bestselling author of Fake Accounts