September 2024
Yesterday I discovered Maria Semple. Today I finished Today Will Be Different.
It’s not like me to chow a book in a day. But it’s not often you find a book that you might have written – that you wish you’d written.
Remember the 33 New Year’s Resolutions in Bridget Jones’s Diary? Today Will Be Different’s first page is this:
“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.”
A distracted, unresolved, uncentred, unfit, not young, slovenly and reliably irritable narrator?
Oh, Maria Semple, I was in.
It’s clear from Page One that Maria Semple can write. She’s funny, clever.
Her introduction of the character Barnaby (Bucky) Fanning, the ‘Troubled Troubador’, made me laugh out loud. It’s too long to quote here in full, but it contains the line:
“During the holidays, Bucky would stand over the trash and drop in Christmas cards unopened while keeping mental score of who’d sent them.”
But good writing does not a good novel make. You need a good story, well told. You need interest.
I wolfed this book because every page held a surprise. There were two major – and I mean major – plot points that I did not see coming.
One was about the narrator’s sister, the other about her husband. The first explains the narrator’s state of mind, the second offers a path to healing.
Today Will Be Different includes a short, full-colour graphic novel – yes, it does – and there are drawings elsewhere too.
This cover of this book might look a bit like I Don’t Know How She Does It, or another modern-woman-appeal book that would translate well to TV.
It’s not. Maria Semple has written a book that deserves all seven pages of its rave shout-outs.
It’s different. Read it today.
I read Happy Place by Emily Henry on my summer holiday. See the people jumping into the water with me by the pool?
It’s so rare to be get that right, don’t you find? And so excellent when you do … a wintery novel read by a fire; a Tannie Marie to the smell of rusks baking. I read Green Lion by Henrietta Rose-Innes in a game park (at night, in the tent, hearing lions roar, the book was at my side). I read Jackie Kay’s memoir, Red Dust Road, in a hot car on a road trip.
But I would have read Happy Place anywhere. I’m very interested in Emily Henry. I read another of hers, Book Lovers, earlier this year. Over here, Emily Henry is the queen of contemporary romantic fiction. She brings skill and depth to a hugely popular genre, and she’s adored for it.
Happy Place is complex. It’s a love story between Wyn and Harriet – they’re boy and girl when we meet them – but it’s also a group love story.
A group love story?
It is, in the sense that the novel centres on three girls who mean the world to each other. In the absence of other support systems, they’ve helped form each other. Loyalty to each other is vital. All three are willing to sacrifice for the group. The love is huge.
Over the course of a decade, for the sake of unity, information has been left out and dynamics have been left unchallenged.
It happens in long-term relationships. Here, it happens between three friends.
What hasn’t changed since the three met as undergraduates is their Happy Place in Maine: the house near the sea, in the small town, with the pier and the cold sea and the morning take-away coffees.
But the Happy Place is being sold. This is the last time the group will meet here. Will this be the week that will cement the group’s bond for the future, or could it shatter everything? And if the group does shatter, how could that possibly be for the best?
Underneath this narrative, Emily Henry has hidden her love story. Harriet and Wyn have shared eight years’ worth of history, desire and hurt. They’re currently broken up – for all the right reasons. And now they must pretend to be together, just for the week in Maine – for all the right reasons.
It’s agony. All the reasons for the break-up still stand. And both Harriet and Wyn are inflicting new hurts. So why the continued hotness? Why the breathless rage, the desperate sadness and the secret, sexy meetings (first prize: wine cellar; second: shower)?
It’s not easy to tell the stories of multiple relationships, and multiple backstories, over decades.
Emily Henry writes beautifully about all types of love – including the love of place – and her plot is tight.
As genres, romance and ‘chick-lit’ have come a long way.