Eleanor Flood knows she’s a mess. But today will be different. Today she will shower and put on real clothes. She will attend her yoga class after dropping her son, Timby, off at school. She’ll see an old friend for lunch. She won’t swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But before she can put her modest plan into action – life happens.
For today is the day Timby has decided to pretend to be ill to weasel his way into his mother’s company. It’s also the day surgeon Joe has chosen to tell his receptionist – but not Eleanor – that he’s on vacation. And just when it seems that things can’t go more awry, a former colleague produces a relic from the past – a graphic memoir with pages telling of family secrets long buried and a sister to whom Eleanor never speaks.
For today is the day Timby has decided to pretend to be ill to weasel his way into his mother’s company. It’s also the day surgeon Joe has chosen to tell his receptionist – but not Eleanor – that he’s on vacation. And just when it seems that things can’t go more awry, a former colleague produces a relic from the past – a graphic memoir with pages telling of family secrets long buried and a sister to whom Eleanor never speaks.
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Reviews
Semple brilliantly conveys a whole array of angst - self-deprecation and existential dread and a panic attack of neuroses - while simultaneously packing in a liberal dose of levity... It's a joy to watch Eleanor struggle to change for the better. That we get to laugh along with her is an added bonus
So unique, so smart, so funny, so beautifully humane, so utterly of our times, it's astonishing
Quirky and blade-sharp
Crackling with honesty and heart
Outrageously funny. But [Today Will Be Different] cuts closer to the bone than Bernadette did, and its main character's problems feel more real.... Ms. Semple is an immensely appealing writer, and there's something universal in her heroine's efforts to get a handle on a life spinning out of control. We may not all have long-lost sisters who live in the most crazily status-obsessed corners of the South, but we surely know what she means about waking up each dawn with new resolve that melts by midmorning
Written with Semple's hilarity-cum-sincerity, Eleanor grapples with the past to reconcile her future and makes readers smile
Fans of Bernadette will recognize Semple's propulsive and satirical dialogue
Writing a comedy novel that manages to connect emotionally is no easy task, but Semple knocks it out of the park. Today Will Be Different is hilarious, moving and written perfectly, and it makes a good case for Semple as one of America's best living comic novelists
One to Watch: Where'd You Go, Bernadette established Maria Semple as a brilliant comic writer. Today Will Be Different, about a middle-aged mum who is desperately trying to keep control of her life despite having one of those days, is just as smart, funny and original.
I love Maria Semple! TODAY WILL BE DIFFERENT is just as funny, poignant, and life-affirming as BERNADETTE
I adore it. Every bit as smart - and smart-arsed - as BERNADETTE . . . this is wonderful
her narrative oozes stylistic originality
With its sparky gags and quirky cast of characters, never has a meltdown been so entertaining
sees Semple once again writing about a difficult woman with gleeful empathy and humour that can turn on a knife edge to heartbreak
this witty novel is a life-affirming read.
Captivating, right up to the final twist.
Semple has mastered the intersection of sad and nuts like no one else.... Like a cross between Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, the best episides of Bob's Burgers, and the private journal of the smartest, most irritable woman you know, Today Will Be Different is a reckless and scattershot work of genius
A little bit wacky and always wise, and we recognize people we know - including ourselves - on every page
Today will be different, Eleanor Flood tells herself, and oh baby hang on for a wild ride that's like nothing Eleanor sees coming. In this brilliant depiction of a woman hanging on by her fingernails, Maria Semple delivers a perfect panic of a day on which the barely tolerable, muddle-through-it desperation that so many of us have known at one time or another suddenly erupts with life-shattering force. Can an existential crisis make us laugh? Such is Semple's talent that this one does, without losing any of the punch or gravity of the hardest kinds of lived experience
A vivid, hilarious, remarkably compact book - 271 pages' worth of crisp observations and occasionally too-close-to-home truths about modern relationships. And it's anchored by a gorgeous scrapbook-slash-mini-graphic novel
This waspishness selfishness is a clever mask, but Semple has a knack of teasing out the warmth behind it.
I had the uncanny feeling, while reading TODAY WILL BE DIFFERENT, that Maria Semple had somehow snuck into my house when I was asleep, took an x-ray image of my heart, then painted it by hand in neon colors. This book is searingly honest and hilarious and dark and neurotic. It is dizzying. Best of all, it is delicious
It's funny and silly but also poignant and more than a little reminiscent of Semple's bestselling Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Clever, funny and silly
Whipsmart, dazzling, darkly comic and deeply touching. I loved it!
A zesty, memorable novel
Another tour de force... The success of this poetic, seriously funny and brainy dream of a novel - 'Mrs. Dalloway Takes Laughing Gas', perhaps - has to do with Maria Semple's range of riffs and preoccupations. All kinds of details, painful and perverse and deeply droll, cling to her heroine and are appraised and examined and skewered and simply wondered at. If that's considered a trick, readers of Semple's novel will be overjoyed to fall for it
an entertaining book to while away a few hours.
The joy, as before, is in the narrative voice... Brilliant set-pieces include a scene of existential despair in CostCo, a flashback to a hideous society wedding in the deep south, and Dr Joe's epiphany during a Seattle Seahawks game.. Semple reaffirms her gift for creating memorable, monstrous characters
Brisk, amusing and engaging, and Semple is a champion observer of the human condition
Readers who devoured Where'd You Go, Bernadette will love Eleanor [Flood]'s wry voice and dark humor
In her latest brainy, seriously funny novel, private school parents, a husband's secret life and more confront a Seattle woman
Deliciously mucky mayhem
This whip-smart, bleakly humorous study of how we live now is full of finely drawn characters and deserves to widen her fanbase.
There are some good lines and more than a few laughs, plus occasional pungent observations on life
Loopy, deeply and darkly funny, and brave... Semple is a master of the social skewer, boldly impolite and impolitic... Eleanor is as sharp and Semple-esque as they come, which is to say a delightful danger to herself and others, sympathetic, and so very smart
Wickedly funny... Semple's trademark dark humor and knack for creating a page-turning story out of socially awkward interactions will make this one you can't put down - and won't want to
Today Will Be Different starts off as a funny, rant-y novel and becomes, by its end, an unexpectedly heartfelt exploration of a woman's inner life. (And yes, it's still funny.)
Today Will Be Different is a sublimely funny and inventive novel driven by Maria Semple's razor-sharp observations and a voice that leaps from the page