Bestselling author/TV writer to speak in Park Slope
Maria Semple, author of national bestseller “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” has recently released her book in paperback (Back Bay Books), and is slated to speak in Brooklyn on May 9 as part of Community Bookstore’s and Congregation Beth Elohim’s Brooklyn By The Book series. While Semple’s background primarily consists of TV writing – she’s written for “Mad About You,” “Ellen,” and “Arrested Development – she has authored one previous novel, “This One is Mine,” and her latest book is brilliantly crafted.
“Where’d You Go Bernadette” satirically portrays modern parenting, focusing on a Seattle-based family transplanted from Los Angeles. Semple creates enormously entertaining characters – most notably Bee, an eccentric and remarkably bright teenager; Bernadette Fox, Bee’s agoraphobic mother who once won a MacArthur Genius grant for her architectural work; and Elgin Branch, Bernadette’s husband, who is devoted to his family despite his intense commitment to his high-ranking job at Microsoft.
Bernadette – who has a strong distaste for Bee’s classmates’ parents (whom she calls “gnats”) – is so put off by other humans that she hires a virtual assistant, Manjula, to manage all of her errands from India. When the family is planning a vacation in Antarctica, Bernadette even has Manjula coordinate all arrangements. After a series of dramatic events, all of which Semple enlivens by gradually unfolding a story through comical emails and letters, Bernadette mysteriously disappears. Though Bee narrates the book – which, at the outset, mentions Bernadette’s vanishing – the perspective is constantly shifting; Semple tells the story almost entirely through written correspondence between various characters. In a determined effort to find her mother, Bee gets her hands on a slew of documents that clue her in on both her mother’s and father’s histories and actions that led to Bernadette’s disappearance.