The Heroine of Emma Straub’s “This Time Tomorrow” Brings Her Back to the Future
She’s written historical fiction and short stories, and even founded the beloved Brooklyn bookstore Books Are Magic, but bestselling author Emma Straub is most famous for her wry, warm novels exploring how our relationships shape, delight, wound, and, ultimately, sustain us. At first skim, This Time Tomorrow seems like a departure from Straub’s previous family dramas centered on the ties that bind. In this through-the-looking-glass saga, 40-year-old Alice Stern discovers a time-travel portal near her childhood home that enables her to return, repeatedly, to her 16thbirthday, dipping into the past in attempts to reshape her present. But while the mechanics of the plot borrow from sci-fi, the tone of the book is pure Straub: a funny, moving look at the most important relationship in one woman’s life.
The reader is already rooting for insightful, imperfect Alice before the she starts hurtling between eras, as Straub spends the first 68 pages immersing us in the heroine’s tense present. Phoning in her existence in an unsatisfying relationship with a good-on-paper boyfriend and all-too-comfortable job as an admissions counselor at her alma mater, Alice is consumed by the fact that her beloved father, who raised her as a single dad, is confined to the hospital in a coma. When this middle-aged, worried woman finds herself in her 16-year-old body, complete with flat stomach and luminous skin, it’s not just a return to a more carefree time but a glow-up by way of a reverse grow-up. Straub writes, “There was a small pimple growing in her chin, threatening to break through the surface, but, otherwise, Alice’s face looked like a Renaissance painting. Her skin was creamy and smooth, her eyes were bright and big, the apples of her cheeks were comically pink.”
Restored to the youth she never appreciated, or even noticed, at the time, Alice spends a few hormonally charged tours into the past reliving, and revising, her relationship with her crush. Still, the real lure that brings her back to adolescence repeatedly isn’t lust but love—she returns again and again for the joy of seeing her unconscious father restored to a healthy, happy man in his prime. Along the way, she reconsiders her past, her present, and their relationship as she knew it. “He had been young, and she had been young—they had been young together,” Straub writes. “Why was it so hard to see that?”
Leonard Stern isn’t just Alice’s North Star. As the author of a landmark novel about two time-surfing brothers, he’s also the living link between the New York of today that Alice inhabits and the sci-fi plot twist that has her returning to 1996. With him and his cronies around discussing the mechanics of transtemporal tourism, from wormholes to multiverses to infinite loops, This Time Tomorrow serves as a Cliffs Notes of time travel literature and films—Straub name-checks everything from A Wrinkle in Time to Peggy Sue Got Married. It’s all presented so matter-of-factly that buying into the idea of bopping between birthdays on the space-time continuum becomes eminently doable.
If the inter-era travel requires a slight suspension of disbelief, so does the present-day setting. Highlighting the relentless onward march of time, there are moments in the book’s present that already seem anachronistic. Alice’s current New York appears to be a place Covid never touched: Her father’s convalescence seems to unfold in a pre-pandemic oasis of visiting hours with more than one guest at a time allowed; and while the whale at the Museum of Natural History serves as a symbol of constancy, unchanged from Alice’s youth, many current New York kids view that same sea creature as a witness to their vaccine shots. Virus aside, Alice is mystified that her boyfriend can afford to rent on the Upper West Side—despite the fact that she lives in Cobble Hill, which, according to 2021 property sales, is the 16th-most-expensive neighborhood in New York City, with the humble UWS clocking in at 18th. Straub’s version of current-day New York feels as idealized and nostalgic as a Nora Ephron film, which is fitting because a happy-fantasy take on reality is part of the appeal of books set in other eras. But, like most of the seemingly lighthearted elements in the novel, the throwback vibe also carries a weightier message, emphasizing the idea that change is the only constant. Alice thinks, “New York City did this over and over again, of course, a snake shedding its skin in bits and pieces, so slowly that by the time the snake was brand new, no one would notice.”
But Straub has seen the changes, not just in the city but in ourselves, and she offers them to readers as madeleines meant to inspire our own remembrances of things past. Alice’s time travel serves up plenty of nostalgia crack for those of us old enough to recall the “war on drugs”: girls smell of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers, Herbal Essences shampoo, or “the first floor of Macy’s, like an entire bottle of CK One was being sprayed out of her pores,” while boys are slowly moving past “the Jordan Catalano school of fashion.” But the driving issue at its core is evergreen and constant: “I guess my real question is how do you know which choices matter?” Alice asks a school administrator, prompting the reader to think: Same, girl! Same.
This Time Tomorrow is a case of come-for-the-wacky-time-warp/stay-for-the-timeless-wisdom, a delicate balance that makes the novel feel less like science fiction and more like magical realism. The otherworldly element serves to illuminate the fact that by our 40th birthdays, we’ve all traveled through time, and that journey isn’t as linear as it seems. Yes, while Alice is reeling through the years in a circular loop, the rest of us age in one direction. But as we go, we carry our earlier selves within us, like moving, breathing matryoshka dolls.
The central tragedy of this joyful, hopeful, witty book is that we are forever evolving, losing each moment even as we’re living it. Cities change, and people come and go, and only one thing remains constant. As Alice’s father insists, “Love doesn’t vanish. It’s still there, inside everything you do…you couldn’t get rid of it if you tried.” In the end, the most remarkable thing about This Time Tomorrow isn’t that Straub manages to make us believe the main character is a time traveler; it’s that she forces us to realize we all are.
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