Traveling in time with Emma Straub in her new novel 'This Time Tomorrow'

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

If you could go back in time to when you were 16 years old, what would you change? This question is at the heart of Emma Straub's new novel, This Time Tomorrow, a story about a father-daughter relationship that gives readers a more intimate and personal exploration of time travel. In an interview with All Things Considered, Straub told Mary Louise Kelly that she wrote the novel in 2020 as a way to escape from feeling trapped in quarantine and that, in many ways,the story turned out to be autobiographical.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Time travel stories have a tendency to be big, right? I'm thinking about that Christopher Nolan movie Tenet or even those Outlander books where the main character gets sent back to the 18th century. Today's book, This Time Tomorrow by Emma Strub, deals with time travel in a
0:22.8	smaller, more intimate way. The main character gets sent back to the age of 16. And Strubb and NPR's
0:30.2	Mary Louise Kelly have this really sweet interview about using the opportunity to just cherish
0:36.6	some of the smaller joys in life, like
0:39.2	watching Jeopardy with your dad.
0:41.4	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
0:46.3	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources and
0:52.3	methods.
0:52.8	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people
0:56.1	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:00.1	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:05.6	If you could be your 16-year-old self all over again, what would you change? That question is at the heart of
1:13.5	Emma Straub's new novel this time tomorrow, in which the central character, Alice, is turning
1:19.3	40. But when she wakes up in the morning after, what we can fairly call, a big birthday bender in a bar,
1:26.8	she is not 40. She is 16 16 she is somehow back in her teenage
1:30.9	bedroom in her teenage body and everyone around her including her beloved dad is young again too
1:37.4	emma straub hey there hi thanks for having me okay i want to start with alice as mentioned, she's turning 40, but she still lives in the same apartment she had since
1:48.7	she was 25.
1:49.8	She is still in the same starter job working at the school that she went to when she was a kid.
1:55.6	She's dating a guy she's not really in love with, and it's not clear she's going to do
1:59.7	anything about that.
2:01.0	Is it, is it fair to say Alice is stuck?
	...

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