ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT
MUSIC/ART/FILM/LITERATURE
by KARL HERCHENROEDER for THE ASPEN TIMES
SEMPLE RETURNS TO ASPEN TO DISCUSS ‘BERNADETTE’ WHEN NOVELIST MARIA SEMPLE is working, she spends half
her days walking. It’s how she frees herself from the corners she’s written herself into. She’ll write and go for a walk, and then repeat. It’s a process that helped her write six drafts in about a year for her second novel, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” Semple returns to her hometown March 31 for the Aspen Writers’ Foundation Winter Words series, and it will be the last stop on the “Bernadette” tour. After Aspen, she will begin work on her third novel. “I came up with an idea that has a lot of energy and that kind of makes me shutter and get excited, but I don’t know if it’s really going to be the one,” she said. “When I do sit down to write it, if it still has the kind of urgency and I feel like the resonance, then that’s a good sign.” Her debut novel, “This One is Mine,” was a scathing take on Los Angeles, the city where she found success as a television screenwriter in the 1990s. Semple, the daughter of famed L.A. screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr., said it was on “Beverly Hills, 90210” that she found she wasn’t fit for drama, leading her to three years of work on the sitcom “Mad About You.” She is also credited for working on “Suddenly Susan,” “Ellen” and “Arrested Development,” but it was “Mad About You” that she most enjoyed. “I could kind of draw more from my own life,” she said. After finding success on television, Semple, who has always enjoyed novels, felt restless and attempted “the scariest thing I can think of.” As a novelist, she said, you are far more exposed than in screenwriting. You are no longer part of a group, and you have no one else to blame if the writing fails. “When you’re writing a novel, it’s just so purely all you,” she said. “It feels like a much greater emotional risk, and you feel much more exposed, but it turns out that I like that. I get
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off on that. It kind of pushes me as opposed to hinders me.” Semple continues to be amazed by “Bernadette,” which has spent almost a year on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list for paperbacks and about seven months before that on the hard-cover list. The story takes place in Seattle, where Semple relocated after L.A. Bernadette Fox is an accomplished architect who abandons her career in a rage of professional disillusionment, personal frustration and familial circumstance, namely her 15-year-old daughter, Bee. Semple’s real daughter was six when “Bernadette” was written, and Semple said that if there is anything she drew from reality, it’s the unconditional love she has for her daughter, for whom the book was written. “It really is a gift to her, because I
feel like an unsuccessful, complicated, bad mother in a lot of ways, that I failed her in a lot of ways,” she said. “I also know that the love I have for her is greater than all that, and I hope that this book somehow articulates all of that.” A graduate of New York City’s Barnard College, Semple said she has never been one to procrastinate. She may put off other things, but never writing, and she said some people don’t understand that. Whether it’s someone asking her to volunteer her time or go to lunch in Seattle, she’s never afraid to explain what comes first. “With female novelists, I think it’s much more a problem with them. People always just think that you don’t have to write that day — like you can do the other thing that they want you to do,” she said. “There’s a big
force every day, kind of keeping you from writing, and you have to push through it. And it certainly turns you into a bitch.” It has been about three years since Semple was in Aspen, and when she returns, she’ll spend time at the library or in the West End, where she was raised. Her brother and local Aspen character, Lo Semple, will moderate the Winter Words discussion. Maria, who requested that Lo do the interview, is looking forward to the humiliation he might set off. “I thought it might be a good chance for him to throw me some really embarrassing questions and perhaps create some fireworks,” she said. “I just hope he doesn’t make me cry for some reason because he certainly would know how to.”
herk@aspentimes.com
Maria Semple, screenwriter and author of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” will appear for a 7 p.m. talk at the Paepcke Auditorium on March 31.
Mar ch 27 - Apr il 2 , 2014