I’ll Be Awesome Tomorrow: A Memoir of Chasing Perfection and Letting Go

Marian Sandmaier opens this memoir with a hard stop. She is sitting at a kitchen table with her boyfriend, Dan, and telling him she wants to die. It is a blunt beginning, but it is also a clean one. Sandmaier does not drift into the story. She drops us into the worst of it, then works backward to explain how a bright, capable girl became a woman trapped in a private war with herself.

The answer starts early. By age 8, she was already dreaming of becoming someone else, someone shinier, easier, more adored. Not merely better. Transformed. The memoir follows that hunger through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, as Sandmaier chases perfection through appearance, performance, romance, work, and self-control. She wants to be charming, fearless, wanted, and above all, immune to rejection. What she gets instead is exhaustion, shame, and a life lived under a punishing internal voice.

Sandmaier is so direct about what perfectionism actually costs. She does not prettify depression or dress up the damage. She shows the panic, the freeze response, the cruel self-talk, and the deep need to be loved without having to be herself first. That honesty gives the memoir its force. She understands that perfectionism often passes for discipline when, for some people, it is really fear with a good posture.

Dan gives the book its emotional anchor. He is not a savior. He is simply present, stubborn, and alarmed enough to keep trying. Their conversations bring the story down to a human scale. Sandmaier writes especially well about the small, ugly, ordinary moments that carry real weight. A look. A pause. A sentence said too late. She knows how much can turn on something that would look minor from the outside.

At times, the memoir circles the same emotional territory more than once. That fits the subject, since perfectionism is repetitive by nature, but some readers may want a little more forward motion in the middle. Even so, Sandmaier keeps the pages moving because the stakes stay high. She is not just recounting pain. She is documenting the slow work of loosening a grip that had become a way of life.

I’ll Be Awesome Tomorrow is strongest when it refuses easy redemption. Sandmaier does not pretend to have solved herself. She argues for something harder and more useful: learning to live without the fantasy of becoming flawless first. That makes this memoir sharp, humane, and worth the time.