Today Will Be Different
Maria Semple, 2016
Little, Brown and Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316403436
Summary
A day in the life of Eleanor Flood, forced to abandon her small ambitions and awake to a strange, new future.
Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today, she will tackle the little things.
She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe.
But before she can put her modest plan into action-life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company.
It's also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office—but not Eleanor—that he's on vacation. Just when it seems like things can't go more awry, an encounter with a former colleague produces a graphic memoir whose dramatic tale threatens to reveal a buried family secret.
Today Will Be Different is a hilarious, heart-filled story about reinvention, sisterhood, and how sometimes it takes facing up to our former selves to truly begin living. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June, 1964
• Where—Santa Monica, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington
Maria Keogh Semple is an American novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of three novels. Her television credits include Beverly Hills, 90210, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live, Arrested Development, Suddenly Susan and Ellen.
Early Life
Semple was born in Santa Monica, California. Her family moved to Spain soon after she was born. There her father, the screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr. wrote the pilot for the television series Batman. The family moved to Los Angeles and then to Aspen, Colorado. Semple attended boarding school at Choate Rosemary Hall, then received a BA in English from Barnard College in 1986.
Film
Her first screenwriting job was in 1992, for the television show Beverly Hills, 90210. She was nominated for a Primetime Emmy, Outstanding Television Series, in 1997 for Mad About You. In 2006 and 2007, she was nominated for a Writer's Guild of America award, for Arrested Development. She appeared in the 2004 David O. Russell film I Heart Huckabees.
Novels
Semple's three novels include Today Will Be Different (2016), Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2012), and This One is Mine (2008). Her books center around women who juggle and struggle with contemporary life: work, family, love, and self-esteem. Critics have referred to her writing as witty, funny, inventive, and even "a little bit screwball" (Washington Post).
She is active in the Seattle literary community, and a founding member of Seattle 7 Writers. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker Magazine. She has also taught fiction writing at the Richard Hugo House.
Personal Life
Semple is in a relationship with George Meyer and has one daughter with him, Poppy. They reside in Seattle. In 2007, a newly discovered species of moss frogs from Sri Lanka was named Philautus poppiae after their daughter, a tribute to Meyer's and Semple's dedication to the Global Amphibian Assessment. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/28/12.)
Book Reviews
Let me say upfront: I couldn’t put the thing down. Today Will Be Different shows us a woman all too many readers will feel an immediate kinship with. Her life teeters on the edge of out-of-control, but she is determined to do things differently. That way, she thinks, she’ll end up with a nice, neat, perfectly-ordered life—one that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. READ MORE.
Cara Kless - LitLovers
[F]unny, smart, emotionally reverberant.... The success of this poetic, seriously funny and brainy dream of a novel...has to do with Maria Semple's range of riffs and preoccupations. All kinds of detalis, 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.
Meg Wolitzer - New York Times Book Review
Hilarious [and] heartwarming.... The book follows a restless Eleanor, who sets out to reinvigorate her life, only to be shoved astray by a number of chance setbacks
Dana Getz - Entertainment Weekly
[A] sharp, funny read.... Though Eleanor is snarky, her troubles and growing calamities are engaging.... In the end, the novel wraps up too neatly, but the ride is consistently entertaining.
Publishers Weekly
An introspective look, both comedic and tragic, at attempting to be the best one can be: wife, mother, or sibling. While not as laugh-out-loud funny as Where'd You Go, this book will satisfy fans of Semple and satire. —Stephanie Sendaula
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A day in the life of an enchanting and gifted woman who is almost too frazzled to go on... [F]ew will be indifferent to this achingly funny and very dear book. This author is on her way to becoming a national treasure.
Kirkus Reviews
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