Maggie is a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée from Canada, and the protagonist in the contemporary humorous novel Really Good, Actually, written by Monica Heisey. Maggie is an anxious, overthinking young woman who felt devastated after her husband, Jon — whom she fell in love with in university — left her. The book focuses on her struggles with self-esteem, body image, and, of course, the depression caused by the divorce. It begins with Maggie worrying about how to tell her friends that Jon left her, shortly before her twenty-ninth birthday, and follows through her first year as a single woman, ending soon after her thirtieth birthday when the official divorce papers finally arrive.
Maggie is openly bi, but she has always had a complicated relationship with her orientation. Because she was in a relationship with one man for most of her adult life, she doesn’t feel “bi enough.” She tells herself that she is “at least 35% bi,” but she is unsure if she truly belongs in the LGBT community. Before the divorce, she had never explored this part of her identity deeply. She asserts her bisexuality partly as a reflection of her progressive, leftist political identity — she is obsessed with social justice, sometimes excessively, even if she barely understands the news. For her, being bi-friendly is more about politics than lived experience — at least before her divorce.
After Jon leaves, Maggie realizes she doesn’t even know what kind of food she likes, let alone her own romantic and sexual preferences. She begins exploring her sexuality, from participating in threesomes with her queer friends, to dating various men and women on Tinder. For her, it is an entirely new life. Living in Toronto, where queer people feel free to be themselves, she becomes fully open as a queer person. She nearly enters a serious relationship with a man and has several good dates with a woman, but ultimately, after therapy, she decides to stay single for a while to better understand what she wants as a person — outside of a relationship. Even after a year, she is still grieving her divorce, but she also begins to see that this is not the end of the world.
As bi representation, the novel portrays a modern bi millennial who is comfortable with her identity but still struggling to fully understand herself. Her friends are progressive, and she wouldn’t feel rejected by her family or social circle for being queer, but she never had the opportunity to explore her bisexuality fully. The divorce gives her that chance, as well as a chance to rethink many other choices she made in the past.
Maggie will resonate with bi people who have recently ended a long-term heterosexual relationship and are trying to build a new life.