Today Will Be Different

Stemple, Maria. Today Will Be Different. New York: Little, Brown 2016. Print

First Sentences:

Because the other way wasn't working.

The waking up just to get the day over with until it was time for bed. The grinding it out was a disgrace, an affront to the honor and long shot of being alive at all. The ghost-walking, the short-tempered distraction, the hurried fog ....The leaving the world a worse place just by being in it. The blindness to the destruction in my wake. The Mr. Magoo.

Description:

Maria Stemple is a writer of quirky characters and plots, so you can expect her latest novel, Today Will Be Different, to be another unpredictable ride. The book recounts one day in Eleanor Flood's life when she resolves to completely change her life into something more productive and organized. She is determined to "look people in the eye and listen deeply," to"change into yoga clothes only for yoga," to "not swear" and to "radiate calm." Quite a list!

As for my constant low-grade of confusion -- the Blur is a term that seems to be sticking -- let me break it into three categories: 1) things I should know but never learned, 2) things I choose not to know, and 3) things I know but totally screw up.

The book follows her on one day spent in a whirlwind of unexpected situations, goofiness, poetry, parenting, and encounters with people of all sorts from her past and present. To not spoil any of the fun, here are just a few of the novel's characters we meet:

• Eleanor - the ditsy narrator, trying to escape her fame as a former children's television show designer, mother, wife (maybe not anymore?), memorizer of poetry, and procrastinator of writing her commissioned memoirs;
• Joe - Eleanor's husband and brilliant hand surgeon, who Eleanor just found out is on an unknown "vacation" from his office that he didn't tell her about;
• Timby - cross-dressing young son of Eleanor and Joe who fakes illness to stay home from school and spend the day with his mother;
• Alonzo - Eleanor's poetry tutor who discusses poetry with her each week over breakfast;
• Spencer - former employee of Eleanor who was fired by her for lack of talent, only to rise years later as a hugely successful painter;
• Yo-Yo - family dog which is inadvertently left by Eleanor outside a Cosco tied to some shopping carts 

Quirky enough for you?

But there is so much more. Inserted into the middle pages of Today Will Be Different is a hidden gem: a beautifully-illustrated unpublished copy of Eleanor's graphic book, The Flood Girls, which portrays significant incidents in her life alongside an imaginary(?) sister. This short book and illustrations are simply gorgeous to come across while reading the novel, and we can only wonder about the origins and role this book-with-a-book might play in Eleanor's unusual day and subsequent life.

Not everyone will enjoy Maria Semple's humor, but I really do. She is a former writer for the television shows Arrested Development, Ellen, and Mad About You, so has a track record of creating off-beat comic situations and slightly odd characters. Today Will Be Different is definitely a wild ride full of black humor and quirkiness. 

And don't forget to read her other gem, Where Did You Go, Bernadette?

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Stemple, Maria Where Did You Go, Bernadette?.   

When eighth-grader Bee Branch asks her parents to fulfill a promise to go on a family trip to Antarctica, her reclusive mother is aghast and disappears days before the scheduled trip is to begin. Quirky, outright funny, and definitely compelling. (previously reviewed here)