51 pages • 1 hour read
Emma StraubThis Time Tomorrow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Alice Stern visits her father, Leonard Stern, in the hospital, though he’s often too weak to speak with her or recognize her presence. Leonard’s undiagnosed illness is difficult to manage because there are no available treatments; he is simply dying slowly as one part of his body after another shuts down without apparent cause.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Alice lets her mother, Serena, know that she visited Leonard and that his condition remains the same—a message Serena acknowledges but does not engage with. Serena left their family to live in a wellness community when Alice was six, leaving her father with sole custody. Now 39 and an only child, Alice doesn’t wish her parents had stayed together, but she does wish she had help looking after her father. Serena is caring but largely absent, having let New Age advice and gifts of healing crystals stand in for parental guidance for the bulk of Alice’s life.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Alice reflects on her lifestyle and living situation. She and her boyfriend, Matt, live apart: Alice in the same affordable Brooklyn studio she’s lived in since age 25, and Matt on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Alice grew up. Alice likes this arrangement. She notes that Matt’s building is full of wealthy people; having grown up with the money from her father’s best-selling and television-adapted novel Time Brothers, Alice is accustomed to the different characterizations of wealth in New York City. Now she works in the admissions office of the prestigious private school Belvedere, which she attended.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
At Matt’s apartment, Alice reflects that they aren’t the best couple, but she does like being with him. Most of her friends are married with kids or on their second marriages. She’s curious about marriage but isn’t sure if she will marry Matt if he asks her. She doesn’t know if she wants to have children, a fact that causes her some unease: “[S]he knew that at some point in the very near future, her not knowing would swiftly transform into a fact, a de facto decision. Why wasn’t there more time?” (18).
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
At work, Alice takes a smoke break with her colleague Emily, who is in her late twenties and whose conversation tends to be limited to her dating life. As an afterthought, Emily asks after Alice’s father, and she tells her he’s not doing great.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Emily and Alice’s boss, Melinda, gives them a stack of kindergarten applications. There are 200 applicants for 35 spaces, making their job one based on highly selective judgment. Alice often wonders if she could be an art teacher or a child psychologist because she likes interviewing the children for Belvedere. Alice’s plan had been to be an artist, but that career path didn’t work out for her. Most of her art friends have left the city, and she misses her community of artists.
One of her applicants is a little boy named Raphael Joffey, and Alice realizes he must be the son of her high school flame Tommy Joffey, whom she hasn’t seen in years. She anticipates seeing him again with nervousness and pleasure.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
Alice tries to keep memories of her father alive in preparation for his inevitable death, recording a conversation between him and a nurse, Denise, to help remember his voice. She recalls images of him writing at their kitchen table when she was in high school. Despite his constant writing and the massive, consistent success of Time Brothers, Leonard never published another novel. Alice visits him dutifully and leaves only when visiting hours are over. She makes sure to tell her father she loves him, even if she’s unsure that he can hear her.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
Matt arranges a dinner date with Alice for her 40th birthday. When she tells her best friend, Sam, Sam is certain that Matt will propose. Alice used to be envious of Sam’s happy marriage and life as a mother of three, but now Alice is happy with the freedom of her lifestyle. She reflects that she wasn’t raised to value marriage because of her parents’ divorce. As Alice walks to the restaurant for her date with Matt, she admires the city she has always lived in and loved.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
At dinner, Matt seems nervous, and Alice is certain that a proposal is coming. They’ve been together for a year, but Matt hasn’t even met her father. When Matt does propose with a speech Alice finds hokey and overly rehearsed, she rejects him, reflecting that “[s]he had actually thought it was going to be harder to say no” (39), and tells him that he’ll find a woman more suitable for marriage.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
Alice schedules Raphael Joffey’s interview for the end of the day, when there is a greater likelihood that Tommy will be able to make it, even though the arrangements are made with Raphael’s mother, Hannah. Alice wears a distinctive vintage dress for the interview, wanting to stand out from her Belvedere peers. She hopes that Tommy will have aged into mediocrity, but when she introduces herself to Raphael and Hannah and Tommy hugs her, she feels a strong, familiar attraction.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary
On a smoke break with Emily, Alice tells her about rejecting Matt’s proposal, which impresses Emily. She asks about the “hot […] guy [Alice] went to school with” 45), and Alice reveals what she learned in the interview: Thomas and Hannah lived in Los Angeles until recently, when they moved back to New York to see a specialist for Raphael’s allergies. Hannah is a jewelry designer and short-film maker, and Thomas is a philanthropist.
In a meeting, Melinda announces she’s retiring. Emily asks if Alice will be promoted to Melinda’s job, but Melinda says Belvedere has already hired the admissions director of another prep school, Spencer. Alice is surprised that she’s disappointed about this; she never thought she’d spend her entire career at Belvedere—or that she would want more responsibility in a job that wasn’t her dream career.
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary
For Alice’s 40th birthday, her mother sends her a box of crystals and Sam makes dinner plans with her. Sam gifts Alice a tiara and a framed picture of them in tiaras from Alice’s 16th birthday. Alice admits that she feels sad about turning 40 and facing the prospect of being single and fatherless. Sam has to rush home to her children, so Alice eats the rest of her birthday dinner alone.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary
Alice recalls a conversation about high school she had with her father when he first checked in to the hospital. Leonard had allowed Alice to smoke cigarettes with him in their home and go out with Sam whenever she wanted. She had few rules, but he didn’t worry about her because she was such a good kid. Now, Alice wonders if more structure in her life would have led her to a different, more productive adult life.
Part 1, Chapter 14 Summary
On her 40th birthday, Alice goes alone to a bar that she and Sam favored in their youth, Matryoshka. She hasn’t been to Matryoshka in 15 years, but on this night “she want[s] to have one last drink in a place that she had loved,” thinking, “and then she would go home and wake up forty and one day and she could start all over again” (61-62). The bar is exactly as Alice remembers it, down to the same bartender. When she tells him it’s her 40th birthday, he gives her a shot on the house.
Part 1, Chapter 15 Summary
Alice gets drunk at Matryoshka and takes an Uber to her father’s house—her childhood home on Pomander Walk, which is closer than her apartment. When she can’t find her key, she falls asleep in the adjacent guardhouse, which her father always fondly kept in order, enjoying the cozy nostalgia of being back home.
Part 1, Chapter 16 Summary
Alice wakes up the next morning in her childhood bed and assumes she drunkenly made it inside at some point in the night. She hears the house cat, Ursula, purring for food. Alice goes to the bathroom and is surprised by both her outfit—she doesn’t remember changing clothes last night—and her thighs, which appear to have dramatically slimmed. She goes into the kitchen and sees her father, younger and healthy. He wishes her happy birthday, and she realizes it is her 16th birthday again.
Part 1, Chapters 1-16 Analysis
In Part 1, Straub establishes the central conflict of mortality. Alice has accepted the reality of her father’s mortality, but she finds the act of watching his death slowly unfold challenging. Leonard’s impending death triggers questions about Alice’s own mortality, calling into question the decisions that have shaped her life. Leonard’s mortality also highlights the cruelty of life: Because there's no way to “fix” his body, there’s nothing to do but manage his pain and wait for his death. His death can come at any moment, and this unpredictability, the uncertainty of when Alice’s life will completely change, is its own chronic pain. Leonard’s stasis is its own form of heartbreak. A once brilliant man, he now lives in a hospital. This reality also emphasizes Alice’s loneliness. Her mother is far away and not heavily involved in her life, and she has no siblings, so Alice has no one to share this burden with. She is helpless in the face of Leonard’s mortality, and the role reversal involved in the decline of a parent, in which the child becomes the caretaker, is a difficult transition for her. She doesn’t know how to tell people the depth of her stress about it, and even her boyfriend, Matt, isn’t aware of Alice’s internal struggle to cope.
The theme of Father-Daughter Relationships, as illustrated between Alice and Leonard, is a central dynamic in the novel. Alice grew up with Leonard as her primary parent, since her mother left when she was only six, and though the custody judge noted that it was unusual, at the time, to be raised by a single father, Alice’s relationship with Leonard is tight-knit. She indicates that they always had a mutual trust; while Leonard was a lax and less structured parent than those of Alice’s friends, Alice was always a responsible child. She also feels she had a unique upbringing in terms of Leonard’s expectations for her future. Financially, they were comfortable, but Leonard never pressured her into defining her success in terms of money. He gave her the freedom to find and nurture her passions without pressuring her to decide on a career path. He never remarried, suggesting that he always put himself and his daughter first. Alice emulates this behavior in her adult life; she contemplates the benefits of remaining single and childless and sees her career as malleable and not representative of her true self. Alice’s career is a job, while art is her calling. Alice feels she has a healthy perspective about her life thanks in large part to the respect her father raised her with. Thus, Leonard’s death is also the death of that part of her life.
Companionship is a secondary and lesser conflict in Part 1, but Leonard’s death will bring a new level of solitude to Alice’s life. As Emily and Sam must prioritize their own lives, Leonard is therefore Alice’s only reliable source of companionship. She considers herself happy to be single, and she rejects Matt’s proposal because marriage itself doesn’t interest her. Even so, she questions her embrace of a single lifestyle and wonders if she would feel differently about marriage and motherhood if she had made different decisions in her youth. Her friends are mostly married, but she no longer envies their family lives. She recognizes the freedom of single life and doesn’t force companionship where it doesn’t naturally exist. She also recognizes that solitude does not necessarily equate to loneliness and that single life and marriage both have their benefits and problems. Still, her tendency to question her choices indicates that she is not totally fulfilled by single life.
Part 1 also introduces the issue of time. Leonard’s dying raises the question of how much time Alice has left—both with him and in her own life. Her entrance into a new decade calls all aspects of her life into question; at age 40, she is not where she thought she would be in her youth. She is not the artist she wanted to be, and she has lived in the same apartment for 15 years. Her job as an admissions official is one she never imagined would last for decades, and there’s no possibility for a promotion. Her father’s stasis in health parallels her stasis in life. While she is generally pleased with her job and apartment and doesn’t resent missing opportunities in the past, she wonders what other directions her life could have taken. This nostalgic reflection is exacerbated by the reality of her father’s impending death. On her 40th birthday, she contemplates living life all over again, and Part 1 brings up several turning points in her youth: When Thomas Joffey reappears in her life, she thinks about him as she once knew him, with a longing that suggests a road not taken. Even Sam’s birthday present, the photograph of the two of them on Alice’s 16th birthday, is a symbol of a life Alice has lost her grip on.
The conflict of time, of time lost and the time still left to her, results in a major plot twist. In Chapter 16, the conclusion of Part 1, Alice awakens as a 16-year-old again. Her father is healthy and young, her home is the same, her body is youthful, but she is acutely aware that she is the same 40-year-old Alice on the inside. At this point in the novel, the question of whether the time jump is real—a second chance—or a dream—the manifestation of her longing to try again with the wisdom of the intervening decades—is left open.
