Madeline's Reviews > Today Will Be Different

“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak 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 change into yoga clothes only 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.”

Today Will be Different is, I think, an improvement on Maria Semple’s breakout hit, Where’d You Go, Bernadette. We have to same type of lead character – a Portland housewife with some form of anxiety/manic-depressive/bipolar disorder who is doing the best she can in strange and stressful circumstances. But where Bernadette started to tear at the seams thanks to its unsustainable format of “everything in the book is a letter or email written by one of the characters”, Today Will Be Different has a much more straightforward narration – in this one, we’re simply following the title character through one very strange, very stressful day in her life.

The action starts when Eleanor visits her husband’s office and learns two things: first, her husband has not been to work in over a week; and the office staff thinks that she’s already aware of this. From then on, Eleanor has one mission: find her husband, and find out what he’s been doing while she assumed he was at work. Along the way she gets into what I’ll refer to as sidequests, involving her son, their dog, Eleanor’s poetry teacher, and a former friend.

The action clips along at a quick and engaging pace, and Eleanor’s particular brand of manic, forced cheeriness despite an impending breakdown makes her a delightful and very relatable narrator. (Bonus points to the audiobook reader, who delivers Eleanor’s narration in a cadence that reminded me a lot of Maria Bamford’s standup. Less awesome is the way she voices Eleanor’s son, giving the kid an adnoid-stuffed whine of a voice that made me wonder why Eleanor doesn’t just scream at him to shut up every time he bleats out another petulant MOOOOOOOMMMMMM.)

The only reason this book loses points is, I freely admit, a stupid and petty reason. But I maintain that it’s justified. Semi spoilers (in that they describe what happens at the end of the book but won’t ruin the central mystery of the story) to follow:

(view spoiler)[ So for most of Eleanor’s trek across the city, she’s accompanied by her son and their dog. Towards the end, as the action is ramping up and Eleanor is becoming more frantic in her search, she has to duck into a Home Depot, and leaves the dog tied up outside. She completes her errand, leaves the store, and the story continues. Here’s the problem: she never collects the dog.

At first, as the story just kept going with no mention of the dog, I wondered if it had been an honest mistake. Had Semple’s narration just skipped the bit where Eleanor gets the dog outside the store, I wondered? Is that something an editor let slip, or did Semple just assume that we’d understand that Eleanor has the dog and it doesn’t need to be spelled out? But the story barreled on, and I realized: yep, that dog is definitely still tied up outside Home Depot, and I think Maria Semple was counting on me being so wrapped up in the story that I wouldn’t remember the dog until the moment the characters realize that he’d been forgotten at the store.

LOL, Semple, you underestimate me and my weird infantile relationship with animals in fiction. I always notice the dog, and am hyper-attuned to any danger the dog might be in. So for the last couple chapters of the book, when I should have been paying attention to the story and its conclusion, I was unable to focus. I distinctly remember listening to the audiobook in my car and not even being able to process the narration because I was shouting out loud like a lunatic YOU FORGOT THE DOG SOMEBODY GO BACK AND GET THE GODDAMN DOG. (Don’t worry, they do eventually remember the dog, and when they go back to the store, he’s sitting right where they left him. Because he’s a good boy. But it’s literally the last line in the book and was NOT WORTH all the stress it put me through.) (hide spoiler)]

Anyway, my point is that the entire ending of the book was completely ruined by what I thought was an accidentally dropped plot point, and it was such a distraction that I can’t really tell you exactly what happens at the end of Today Will Be Different. Four stars for the main story, one star for that terribly-executed conclusion.