I'm Not Normally Like This: A Novel

A sharply observed debut for fans of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Sorrow & Bliss following an unreliable narrator who works in social services as she navigates the boundaries between the professional and personal in a case that hits close to home.

Secrets are just stories we haven’t told yet.

This is the ethos by which Elodie lives. Elodie is clever. She’s a fantastic social worker (most of the time), a loving mother and wife (so loving she tracks her husband’s phone and searches through his jacket pockets), and she’s an expert at keeping secrets.

When we meet her—frantic and terrified, sprinting through a museum, having lost a five-year-old boy named Bobby under her care—things are just starting to unravel. The day after the museum incident, Bobby’s mother is found dead, and Elodie’s world begins to spiral out of her tightly held veneer of control. In order to get her life back on track, Elodie is going to have to get her story straight.

Told through the lens of a sharply funny, wholly unreliable narrator, Emily Ostlere’s stunning debut shines a light on an imperfect woman in midlife, profoundly relatable through her struggle to reconcile her internal and external worlds. In turns darkly funny and tenderhearted, I’m Not Normally Like This is about intellectualizing feelings versus embodying them, desperately seeking safety and attachment in all the wrong places, and the sometimes painful process of learning to accept all parts of yourself.