There is an author’s note at the end of This Time Tomorrow in which Emma Straub explains how the inspiration for this novel came from her relationship with her own father. At the end of the author’s note she writes, “I hope that you enjoyed the book and that it made you cry.” I did enjoy This Time Tomorrow, but it did not make me cry, which made me realize how much I do not relate to the protagonist of this story.

This Time Tomorrow is about a New Yorker named Alice who on the night of her fortieth birthday gets really shit faced and passes out in the garden shed outside of her father’s house. When she wakes up, she realizes she has gone back to the day of her sixteenth birthday and is in her sixteen-year-old body. As she spends the day reliving the events of her birthday, she wonders if she is having a very vivid dream, or if she has actually travelled through time and can use this opportunity to do things differently on her birthday to possibly change her future. This includes spending more time with her father who, in the present, is dying from an unknown illness.

The biggest draw of this novel to me was the time travel aspect of it and I did find it interesting. If I were in Alice’s situation, though, would I want to go back to my high school years? I suppose if, like Alice, I was able to go back to my sixteen-year-old self with the knowledge and confidence I have gained in my forty plus years of on this planet, I would be tempted. But honestly, I have no desire to relive high school. High school is not the pinnacle of one’s existence and I have moved on from that time in my life. Besides, I do not hate my life at the moment, so I would be afraid to fuck something up in my future if I went back to my past.

Alice waffles between knowing she has a good life and being unsatisfied with her life, so she has no qualms about going back to the day of her sixteenth birthday over and over, tweaking things here and there to see where she ends up in the future. I was pleased to read a story with a forty-year-old protagonist because I read a lot of books about people in their twenties and thirties who do not have their shit together, but I feel like Alice at forty is less emotionally intelligent than I am in my forties, so that is why I find it hard to relate to her.

Alice’s main purpose for going back to the past over and over, though, is to find a future where her father is not dying. I guess I am just too pragmatic of a person, or maybe because my parents are still healthy I am good at keeping their inevitable deaths in the abstract, but I would have stopped a lot sooner than Alice and accepted the fact that I cannot do anything to prevent my parent’s death. Then again, I do not treat either of my parents as a friend instead of a parent, and I certainly did not sit around drinking and smoking with my parents when I was sixteen, so I suppose I can understand why it is hard for Alice to accept that her father is going to die. This Time Tomorrow is an emotional story, but it did not hit me with the tears. It is a good novel that I think will make you ponder how much you value your life, and your relationships with the people that populate it.