Books |
Maria Semple: Today Will Be Different
By
Published: Oct 03, 2016
Category:
Fiction
Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I’m speaking to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board game with Timby. I’ll initiate sex with Joe. Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed in proper clothes and only change into yoga clothes for yoga, which today I will actually attend. Today I won’t swear. I won’t talk about money. Today there will be an ease about me. My face will be relaxed, its resting place a smile. Today I will radiate calm. Kindness and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.
That’s the opening paragraph of Maria Semple’s novel, “Today Will Be Different.”
You don’t need to be a mind reader to know that her narrator, Eleanor Flood, can’t possibly succeed at all of those pledges.
If you have ever had a conversation like that with yourself — and who hasn’t? — you hope she ticks off most — okay, some — of those boxes.
But, as a reader, you worry: 260 pages about a single day? [Admit it, you never got to the end of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”)
I had a special worry. I am a fan of Maria Semple’s novels — with qualifications.
I stopped loving This One Is Mine well before the end. Because I thought I’d already read the end. Only it kept on going. “For the characters, the complexity, the drop-dead dialogue, ‘This One Is Mine’ is a spectacular debut, and Maria Semple is the real thing,” I wrote. “ If only I were her editor!”
I had the same problem with her best-selling second novel. Where’d You Go, Bernadette. The last section — a 75-page account of a trip to Antarctica — stopped me like a polar wind.
So I am pleased to report that “Today Will Be Different” is completely worthy of the praise it’s getting. You can see, as you could in her earlier books, that Semple was once a writer of high-end TV comedy. (“Mad About You” and “Arrested Development”). But you can also see that life has kicked her around a bit, and she’s thought deeply about marriage and motherhood and careers, and what she’s come up with is very much worth your attention. [To read Chapter 1, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Will Eleanor Flood remind Semple’s fans of Bernadette? Very much. They both live in Seattle. Like Bernadette, Eleanor had a big career in the increasingly distant past, as an animator for “Looper Wash,” an unlikely TV hit series about four girls who have an “unconscious fear of puberty.” She has a son who is a Character and who attends the same school as Bernadette’s kid. Is now a bit lost in her eccentricities and privilege — she’s not working killer hours to deliver a graphic novel that was due to her publisher eight years ago; she’s surprised to learn her editor now runs a cheese shop and that graphic novels are no longer popular.
There is a story, and it’s complicated. Eleanor’s husband, a gifted surgeon, seems to have gone missing without leaving town. She reads poetry with a personal tutor, who is enlisted to babysit her son, who cannot, on this day, make it to noon at school. A canceled lunch date. And a back story, complete with a 14-page full-color insert. And if I tell you more, your head will start to spin and you’ll think this is fancy, absurdist writing, meant to dazzle. It’s anything but.
Semple, in an interview:
One of the things Eleanor realizes is that her marriage is on auto-pilot and if it keeps going that way they’re just gonna be two strangers in a business of raising a child together, where their life just becomes scheduling and emailing each other. … And where he would be going to jazz by himself and she would just be off in her own head. And so this is a book to me about the decision to dig in and to try to, as Eleanor says, not mistake love for youth. You know, that when you’re young you’re just crazy about each other and now you have to work a little harder at it.
And, writing as Eleanor, from the book:
If I see you about to criticize me, I leap in and criticize myself . . . so afraid of rejection that I turned every interaction into a life-or-death charm offensive.
…but life is one long headwind. To make any kind of impact requires self-will bordering on madness. The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will pack you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage— my God, I’m making it sound so glamorous and personal! What the world is, more than anything? It’s indifferent.
My accomplishments? To most people they’d be the stuff of pipe dreams. Anything I’d set out to achieve in this lifetime, I’d done with grace to spare. Except loving well the people I loved the most.
If underneath all anger was fear, then under all fear was love. Everything came down to the terror of losing what you love.
And more. I underlined as if I have to take an exam on the book.
Why this book? Why now? Semple:
The first day when I sat down trying to think of what my new novel would be, I really tried to just be quiet and write what’s the part of myself that I don’t want other people to know and the part that I’m ashamed of, the part that I wish wasn’t the case. And I almost verbatim wrote that first page of the book.
In that spirit, I believe, she wrote the rest of the book. Yes, it’s funny. But it also feels familiar, in a way that hurts. And then heals.
I never thought I’d say a Maria Semple novel moved me. Well, I’m saying it here.
