Monica Heisey – who spent a spell as a screenwriter on cult sitcom Schitt’s Creek – has written her first novel called Really Good, Actually which has been praised for its wit by everyone from Rob Delaney to Dolly Alderton. Marian Keyes described it as “WILDLY funny and almost alarmingly relatable”.
The narrator is a 28-year-old PhD student called Maggie who lives in Toronto and decides to end her marriage to her husband Jon after 608 days. As she says, “I hadn’t lost my husband, I had left him. Or, rather, I had suggested he leave, and he had taken me up on this incredibly quickly. In many ways it was the last thing we agreed on.”
Heisey who herself got divorced at the same age, describes Maggie as looking like her and with the same postgraduate qualification in Shakespearean literature (a friend of Maggie’s describes her job as “you … explain Macbeth”) but Heisey has said that she wrote the book with enough distance for it not to be about her own experience.
