Maria Semple’s Today Will Be Different was critically well received when it was released in 2016, though fans of her previous, rapturously lauded novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, weren’t quite as taken with the story. Many cited its similarities to Bernadette—the frustrated creative at its center, the skewering of a faux-woke Seattle, the upper-middle-class white mom problems—combined with its more conventional mode of storytelling. But unlike Bernadette (which just received the Hollywood treatment, with Cate Blanchett in the title role), Today Will Be Different has an eye for dark comedy and a uniquely grounded take. Both make it a worthy successor.

Today’s plot unfolds over the course of a day in the life of clever, messy, and chronically tardy Eleanor, once a groundbreaking illustrator whose creativity has been subsumed by the conventions of adulthood, wifehood, and motherhood. Eleanor is nine years overdue in delivering a graphic-novel version of her memoir, thanks mostly to her role as primary caregiver to precociously perceptive grade schooler Timby (who got his unusual name from an autocorrected text message).

Eleanor, like many middle-age women who’ve had children later in life, rankles at feeling like she needs to keep up with the cooler-than-thou cult of young mothers around her, who seem to while away their days in spinning or Pilates classes, comparing their contributions to their kids’ schools, or sipping lattes at hipster cafes. When Timby’s school calls her to pick up her sick son, Eleanor rushes out of her tutoring session with a local poet—which she partly attends out of guilt that she should be doing something that resembles self-improvement—to pick him up. At the school office, Eleanor discovers that her son doesn’t seem so sick after all—and, more significantly, her kind, mild husband, Joe, who told pretended to head into the office that morning, told the school he’d be on vacation. Suspicious of an affair, Eleanor embarks on a harried, accident-prone, and frequently nutty journey across the city to dig up the truth.

In Semple’s off-kilter world, what simmers underneath characters’ outward appearances and actions is far more interesting that what’s on the surface. As Eleanor fumbles through one awkward circumstance after another—an unexpected run-in with an acquaintance who’s working at Costco, the installation of pretentious art exhibit, a meeting of devout Christians—the story maintains a zippy, kooky pace. Through a series of third-person flashbacks centered around Eleanor and her estranged sister, Ivy, and another third-person shift into Joe’s world, the reader gets to experience certain scenes from multiple perspectives, and gain more insight into key events. But Eleanor, with her dry wit and often self-flagellating awareness of her own faults, is the star of the book, and it’s hard not to wonder if the second half might have been stronger if it stuck with her perspective.

Today Will Be Differentis less a flight of fancy than Where’d You Go, Bernadette? which gives it a different weight. While it’s not as inventive as Bernadette, it’s still a hilarious, and sometimes moving, exploration of dysfunctional families. Eleanor might occasionally wish she could take off like Bernadette, but she sticks around, which means we get more of her uproarious grappling—with being a creative person in a sometimes stultifying domestic world, with wanting (perhaps needing) to be less judgmental, with comparing her aging self to what and who she once was. The flashbacks with her sister are poignant, and give the reader a window into a relationship that didn’t work out the way Eleanor assumed it would, and the major impact it’s had on her life.

Semple, a former TV writer (for shows like Arrested Development and Mad About You), is an extraordinary comic observer. Shrewd and unsparing, she’s able to identify the common threads of human experience, and then yank them till they unravel, stitch by uncomfortable stitch. Today Will Be Different takes its title from a mantra of Eleanor’s, in which she promises to act like an ideal version of herself. It’s not a spoiler to say that never quite happens, and Today is all the better for it.