Today Will Be Different was not quite, for me, the complete delight that Where’d You Go, Bernadette was, but that’s setting the bar pretty high: I still liked this a whole lot. It starts off really funny (the day I started reading it, I kept interrupting my boyfriend to read him passages I found hilarious) but moves into more emotional territory as the book progresses; the plot is made up largely of over-the-top mishaps, but it unfolds with a precision that I found really pleasing.
The book’s protagonist (and narrator, for much of the story) is Eleanor Flood, a (former) animator who’s working on a graphic memoir; she and her hand-surgeon-to-the-stars husband live in Seattle with their eight-year-old son, Timby. I would say Eleanor is meant to be unlikable, but I’m not sure that’s true: she certainly has some unlikable traits and does some unlikable things, but I was totally rooting for her, especially when the stakes start to feel higher. At the book’s opening, we get a paragraph of (funny/precious/clichéd) ways in which “today will be different”: Eleanor is going to “be present” and further pledges not to swear, not to talk about money, and only to wear yoga clothes when she actually goes to yoga (3). She knows her problems are, as she puts it, “white-people problems,” but that doesn’t mean they’re not problems (7). She’s distracted, rushed, “ghost-walking” through her days in a “hurried fog,” and she’s tired of it, so she vows to do things differently (ibid.). But it quickly becomes clear that the day’s differences are going to be not the kind Eleanor was expecting: she finds out (and I don’t think this is really a spoiler because it’s on the flap copy) that her husband told his office staff they were on vacation the whole week, while she had no idea he was doing anything other than going to work as normal. The question of what he’s been up to is not the only unexpected thing the day throws at Eleanor, but it’s hard to talk about the rest without getting into too much detail, spoiler territory, or both.
I like that this book includes visual art (some of it in color, no less) and also an annotated Robert Lowell poem, and also includes characters from Semple’s other work (Bernadette makes an appearance, and Eleanor used to work for Violet Parry, from This One Is Mine). I like that Eleanor is quick to judge (in a very relatable way) and cynical, but also maybe less cynical than she tries to appear. I wasn’t crazy about one particular revelation toward the end of the book, though that may be my own biases as much as anything; the actual very end of the book felt (interestingly) ambivalent to me, and I wonder how I would feel about it on a re-read.
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