Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Marian Sandmaier’s memoir is a provocative anti-self-help prescription-a bold argument for letting go of the seductive, perilous pursuit of perfection.
From the time she was eight years old, Marian Sandmaier was fixated on one shining goal-to make herself perfect. She had no interest in tweaks or enhancements: Her ambition was to achieve a full-on personality transplant, exchanging an awkward, uncertain girl for a young goddess who was wildly charming and totally immune to rejection. Over the next fifteen years, Sandmaier’s ceaseless efforts to hold herself to this impossible standard led to a destructive intimate relationship and an ever-deepening sense of failure. She would be perfect, damn it-or die trying.
I’ll Be Awesome Tomorrow is a searingly honest account of one woman’s relentless struggle to be flawless-and to finally feel worthy of love. But it also traces what comes after: the author’s slow, strenuous, and ultimately lifesaving work of facing her past and welcoming back her banished self. For anyone who has ever sought to be exemplary-in one’s career, body, personality, or relationships-to the point of exhaustion, this memoir shows that you can choose a gentler, more self-embracing path.
By third grade, Marian Sandmaier knew she wanted to transform herself into something “perfect.”
Her memoir, I’ll Be Awesome Tomorrow, delivers a frank account of her efforts—and the painful struggle to save her long-lost self.
In unpacking her quest for perfection, the author notes there were no catastrophic events in her childhood, aside from an intense desire for her father’s attention.
Her story offers examples of the highs and lows of her life through college, where she struggles with relationships and depression. Yet her story offers signs of resilience as she finally manages to regain control.
I’ll Be Awesome Tomorrow offers a look at a woman’s struggle through unfulfilled and destructive relationships to finally learn to love herself.
Marian Sandmaier is the author of Original Kin: The Search for Connection Among Adult Sisters and Brothers and The Invisible Alcoholics: Women and Alcohol in America. She has written for the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post, and has received three awards for essay writing from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She lives outside Philadelphia, where she makes meatloaf far too often, gardens in partial shade, and loves her life as a recovering perfectionist.
