Just Finished Reading Maria Semple's Today Will Be Different

I am an avid reader, as you probably already know if you've read this blog for any amount of time.  Yet I've hardly begun to scratch the surface of all that is out there to read.  Take Maria Semple, for example.  A few years ago she had a blockbuster bestseller with her novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette, but I had neither heard of her nor of this book when I selected, almost at random, her 2016 work Today Will Be Different from my local public library's shelves.  So I had no idea what I was in for...as it turned out, my reading experience with this book was refreshingly different...

The premise of Today Will Be Different is basic enough: Eleanor, a fifty-year old woman with a background in the TV industry, who with her long-time physician husband has carved out the yuppie dream in suburban Seattle, has woken up one morning and resolved that "today will be different".  Her idea is, of course, that she is responsible for what goes on in her life and, by consciously deciding to do a lot of little constructive things, she will improve her life...sounds like something I would do, something easier decided than implemented, though.  Instead, it seems that with each succeeding hour her life is unraveling...her little boy Timby is having problems at school and manipulates the staff there...and later his pediatrician, into being released so that he can tag along with mommy all day... which doesn't make mommy very happy.  And then Eleanor discovers that her hubby is apparently on "vacation" from his office...without telling her and leading her to suspect that he is having an affair.  So instead of a positive, self-controlled day, Eleanor slips further and further into melancholic introspection about her family, including remembering her estranged sister Ivy.  Along the way, she interacts with different folks she encounters, displaying a tendency to abruptly, emotionally scream at people in public settings and doing all sorts of crazy, impulsive things.  And I'd better leave off here in case you might want to read this story for yourself...

Yes, Today Will Be Different contains a lot of introspection from the viewpoint of someone who has inner conflicts between her previous role with her career and her current one as a homemaker...with regrets abounding about her past, vulnerability about the present, and uncertainty about her future.  I found that, in a general sense, I could be sympathetic to Eleanor's situation and yet also feel that she was in a great way responsible for the predicaments she found herself in.  And she was also a little bit too much of a drama queen to boot. Furthermore, I had some difficulty in feeling for this relatively healthy and wealthy middle-to-upper class person with her assumptions and prejudices...and discontent.  But that's not to disparage the author, who I believe honestly depicted a flawed...and often quite funny...character...

It isn't often that I would recommend that a book I read be adapted to the screen, but I think that, with the proper casting and direction, Maria Semple's Today Will Be Different would make quite a good television movie.  I read some reviews online for this book and discovered that many who read it and her earlier novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette found that they had far too many similarities, which detracted from their enjoyment of the latter.  Still, maybe someday I'll get hold of Semple's more widely known work and try it out for size...