It was hard to find likable the character who flaunted this parenthetical aside: “Me, on the other hand, I’ve been to nine shrinks in twenty years and I’m still like, ‘Wait… what?’” (102) Sympathizing with Eleanor Flood wasn’t happening for me, and I nearly gave up on the book several times. Eleanor Flood doesn’t want to see her friends what makes the reader want to stay with her for a full day, or 200 more pages?īesides, as much as the reader might appreciate a life-out-of-control point of comparison to feel better about his or her own life, Eleanor’s inability to remember life’s basic details requires too much credulity: “What can I say? I’m terrible with faces. “As far as I’m concerned,” she writes, “the only thing sweeter than seeing a friend is that friend canceling on me” (43).
When Eleanor attends a nearly forgotten lunch date with a previous co-worker (and her out-‘sick’- from-school son), the revelation of a past family secret loses some of its punch. So, with a perfectly timed cough, I grabbed that young mom’s ring of keys, dropped them in my purse, and slipped out.Īs Flood continues to ignore phone calls from her literary agent, Joyce Primm, a call joining “the boneyard of other voice mails… none I dared listen to” (38) puts the narrator further out of reach. As she described her annoyance with a group of “young, glowing, physically fit moms” (31), I wanted to laugh, but instead started to lose interest, especially when she responded:
It’s a liberating paragraph-for nursing and non-nursing parents alike-but Eleanor’s self-absorption and lack of many responsibilities (her schedule: poetry lesson, yoga, lunch) make it difficult to relate. You know how your brain turns to mush? How it starts when you’re pregnant? You laugh, full of wonder and conspiracy, and you chide yourself, Me and my pregnancy brain! Then you give birth and your brain doesn’t return? But you’re breast-feeding, so you laugh, as if you’re a member of an exclusive club? Me and my nursing brain! But then you stop nursing and the terrible truth descends: Your good brain is never coming back. (3)Īuthor Maria Semple offers one reason Eleanor might have the cards stacked against her: Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. The book begins with the kind of vow busy parents will immediately identify with:
Today she wants to be her “best self,” because “the other way wasn’t working” (7).Ī writer and illustrator, Eleanor lives in Seattle with her eight-year-old son Timby ( Timby?), a forgotten and forgettable dog Yo-Yo, and her husband Joe, well-loved hand surgeon to the Seattle Seahawks. The Human Desire to Love and Belongīuy Now: Amazon ] Kindle ]Įleanor Flood’s day is about to be different-but not in the proactive way she had committed to.
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