When Alice wakes up on her 40th birthday somehow back in 1996 as her 16-year-old self, she finds the biggest surprise is the 49-year-old version of her father with whom she is reunited, and, armed with a new perspective on life, wonders what she would change given the chance.
Do you ever put off reading a book because you know that you are just not ready for it? That was me with Emma Straub's deeply personal This Time Tomorrow, a novel inspired by the impending death of her beloved father. I kept picking up this book and setting it back down saying, "It is just not the right time." But such as it is with death, it is never the right time, and you are never ready.
As a woman embarking on her 40s with aging parents, such as protagonist Alice in This Time Tomorrow, I could profoundly relate to the multitude of feelings expressed and thoughts pondered in this book. I know that as I grow older, so do my parents, and I can see ever so gradually the role of caretaker being reversed, with them no longer caring for me, but me for them. I know that there will be illnesses. I know that there will be death. I know that there will be sadness, loneliness, and solitude as I someday will be walking this world untethered. Which is what makes This Time Tomorrow all the more relatable.
All Alice has in this world is her father ... and his health is failing. She wakes up every morning wondering if this will be his last. Knowing that someday it will be, and there will be no going back. There's was not an affectionate family growing up, and as her father nears the end of his time on this Earth, Alice grapples with finding a way to express to him all of the ways he was her everything.
On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice drowns in her sorrows, feeling as if she has lived half of her life with no purpose, moving aimlessly about without really going anywhere. She falls asleep outside her father's home in New York City only to awake and discover she has traveled back in time and is reliving her 16th birthday. Now she gets to experience her dad all over again at her own real age - 40 years old. It makes her realize just how young he was all of those times she brushed him off as being "old," and reignites and reshapes their relationship as father and daughter.
Armed with this new outlook and perspective of her life and love for her dad, Alice attempts to find a way back to her former existence, hoping that her newfound wisdom travels with her. But what if her time traveling has changed everything? What if the life she returns to is not the one she knows? How will she be changed? And how will her dad? Can she somehow thwart the future and save him his fate?
This Time Tomorrow is a book that resonated with me as I come to terms with and accept not only my parents' mortality, but that of mine as well. Both therapeutic and insightful, This Time Tomorrow is a guide to grief and loss disguised as a fiction novel, but at the heart of it all, there is so much truth. While not the easiest book to read - it is quite heavy, and yes, I teared up on more than one occasion - this is an important book for anyone needing to not feel so alone and unmoored in an unpredictable, chaotic, and too often cruel world.
Recommended to all who feel too much in their suffering and grief - you are seen. - Brooke, Public Relations Librarian