Maria Semple’s consistently funny third novel, Today Will Be Different, tracks a woman’s existential crisis over the course of a single day. Eleanor Flood is a funny, upper-middle-class Seattleite who has a cool job as the animation director for a successful cartoon. She has a family (and a little dog, Yo-Yo, too) that tolerates and even loves her “unrelentingly verbal” nature. She’s working on a big comic book about growing up with her sister, Ivy, called The Flood Girls, and she’s studying with a poet, Alonzo, to sharpen her already sharp brain for the benefit of the book. In short, she’s a well-off woman who has it all.
But! She has struggles.
She suspects her husband, Joe, a kind and practical and levelheaded person who everyone automatically likes, might be cheating on her. Their 20-year marriage has officially entered its sex-neutral companionate stage. She wishes her precocious and maybe genderfluid kid, Timby, would like her more than he does, and fears she’s losing him to technological distractions and a gender identity she doesn’t understand—and admittedly “aggressively” took no interest in before he started wearing makeup. Mostly, she wants to be the linchpin that holds the family together, but nobody seems to need her. On top of all that, the first draft of The Flood Girls is very late.
