Today Will Be Different

By Maria Semple
  • Character-driven
  • Comedy
  • Fiction
  • Humour
This week I asked myself the question; what book would I love to give to all my friends to make their life, or at least their day, a little better? Immediately "Today will be Different" popped into my head. This is a day in the life of Eleanor Flood, a wife and mother who’s been living in Seattle for the last 10 years, and who describes her existence thus in the first few lines of the book; “The ghost-walking, the short-tempered distraction, the hurried fog” – Oh Lord, I thought, as I gave a guilty little start, how does she know? This week I asked myself the question; what book would I love to give to all my friends to make their life, or at least their day, a little better? Immediately "Today will be Different" popped into my head. This is a day in the life of Eleanor Flood, a wife and mother who’s been living in Seattle for the last 10 years, and who describes her existence thus in the first few lines of the book; “The ghost-walking, the short-tempered distraction, the hurried fog” – Oh Lord, I thought, as I gave a guilty little start, how does she know?
From there on metaphorical mirrors keep popping up to confront you with uncomfortable little truths – even while you’re guffawing out loud you’re wincing a bit too. Career women like herself – she was an animator on a high-profile TV cartoon – who have children late are “trapped in playgrounds, slumped on boingy ladybugs…and sporting skunk stripes down the center of their hair” and she asks “Was the sight of us so terrifying that the entire next generation of college-educated women declared ‘Anything but that!’ and forsook careers altogether to push children out in their twenties?”
Tired of half-assing it, Eleanor decides to live by the Hippocratic oath (First do no harm) for one day, which works out only slightly better for her than Michael Douglas in Falling Down. Side-swiped by life from the moment she gets up and faced with the possibility of her husband having an affair, Eleanor has to deviate from her planned day of serene pursuits – poetry class, yoga, lunch with a friend – and instead embarks on an odyssey across Seattle to uncover the truth with a less-than-satisfactory side-kick in tow in the person of her 8 year old son, Timby, who’s bunking off school. Personal enlightenment (sort of) comes to her through a series of set-pieces – one, brilliantly, in CostCo – and chance encounters, which trigger flashbacks to her neglected childhood and the defining moment when her beloved younger sister cut her out of her life.
Maria Semple has written for TV comedies such as the brilliant Arrested Development, so of course her writing is clever and funny but in this, her third novel, it is also emotionally resonant. I kept hearing the faint echo of another voice as I was re-reading this book and I’ve finally figured out who it is, one Holden Caulfield who, like Eleanor, was allergic to phoniness. Semple is growing as a writer, I can’t wait to see where she’ll go next.
Staff Pick By
Oonagh