Maybe Next Time

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2, Chapters 17-30

Part 2, Chapters 31-47

Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Literary Context: Time-Loop Narratives

Maybe Next Time participates in a long tradition of literary narratives that play with the concept of time for philosophical and moral effect. Many consider The Time Machine by H. G. Wells the work that popularized the literary device of time travel. In the 1895 story, a scientist travels thousands of years into the future and then returns to recount his adventures. Several prominent writers of the 20th century tried the device in their own works, including Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula LeGuin.

The time slip novel, in which the narrator travels through time by supernatural means, has become its own genre; Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819) and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) both use this device. In his hugely popular A Christmas Carol (1843), Charles Dickens introduces travel backward and forward in time to give his protagonist, Ebeneezer Scrooge, a new perspective on his life, spurring him to rearrange his priorities and change his behavior accordingly.

This moral surfaces in the popular American film Groundhog Day (1993), a comedy in which a callous TV weatherman relives the same day until he chooses to act more kindly and selflessly toward others, which wins him friends and a romantic interest. The theme of time morphing as a means to produce self-awareness also appears in successful recent women’s fiction like Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale (2023), in which a young Londoner learns lessons about life and relationships. In Oona Out of Order by Margaret Montimore (2020), the main character learns how to appreciate her life nonchronologically as she leaps to a different time each year.

The impact of time travel on romantic relationships, another theme of Maybe Next Time, was popularized by Audrey Niffenegger in The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), a novel about the relationship between Clare and Henry, who has a genetic disorder that makes him slip to different points in his life. The David Nicholls novel One Day (2009) charts the relationship between Emma and Dexter by describing their lives through the events of one particular and meaningful day over the span of 20 years. Maybe Next Time combines this premise of the significant date as well as the repetition device of Groundhog Day to explore themes relating to relationships, priorities, and building a meaningful life.

Social Context: Challenges That Face Working Mothers

In her book Overwhelmed: Work, Play, and Love When No One Has the Time (2014), Washington Post reporter Brigid Schulte examines the demands on working mothers that prevent them from spending quality time with family or in leisure activities. She calls the constant state of busyness the Overwhelm, and while Schulte is based in the US, she studied working women from several countries to explore various approaches to balancing careers, families, and community service obligations. Debates rage across the developed world, especially in predominately English-speaking countries, about whether women can “have it all”: whether working mothers can find fulfillment in multiple aspects of their lives.

Through lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic changed work arrangements for many and in lasting ways, the question of how to balance work, love, and leisure for a meaningful life still confronts many women. It continues to be the subject of nonfiction studies, for instance by Dr. Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski in Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle (2019), which examines many threads contributing to the stress that working women experience. Work, Parent, Thrive (2022) by Dr. Yael Schonbrun uses Schulte’s concept of the Overwhelm to advise readers on how to find less guilt and more joy. The strategies that all of these authors offer for reframing perspective and making choices around how to spend time are lessons that protagonist Emma Jacobs learns in Maybe Next Time as she sees firsthand the impact that her need to be everything to everyone has on her personal life and relationships.