Although Maria Semple has written two previous novels—most recently the bestselling Where’d You Go, Bernadette, with a film adaptation in the works—the one-time TV writer (Mad About You, Arrested Development) says writing them never gets easier. “You think you’ve written books, so now you write books,” says Semple, “but you have to figure it out the old-fashioned way by trial and error.” For Semple, a source of personal pain, but where the comedy quickly surfaces, is a good place to start a book. Bernadette came out of a conversation with her Los Angeles shrink after she had moved to Seattle, in which he warned her that as a writer who was not writing she could become a menace to society—a fate architect-now-housewife Bernadette tries to escape. For the new novel, Semple sat down with a pen and pad, and started writing about a woman with all the trappings of happiness—a family, a home, a past career in animated television—yet feels like a failure every day. “Today will be different” is the opening line and the title. “I’m really writing about middle-age marriage,” she says.
“I can’t be coy and act like the characters are not me,” says Semple, “because they’re all riffs on me and my pain.” In Today Will Be Different (Little, Brown, Oct.), protagonist Eleanor Flood—wife of a hand surgeon to the stars and mother of young son Timby, who wears makeup to school—can handle the little things, even lunch with an insufferable acquaintance. But when Timby plays sick and she collects him from the Galen Street School (nod to Bernadette), the whole day explodes: her husband has gone on vacation without telling her, an underling she once fired turns up, and a graphic memoir called The Flood Girls resurfaces, which raises questions about her childhood with a widowed bookie Dad and a younger sister she denies exists.
Like Bernadette, Semple infuses her novel with nontraditional narrative elements, including parts of the graphic memoir, illustrated by Eric Chase Anderson (filmmaker Wes’s brother), and a third-person narrative in the middle of the book that spans three decades. “Usually I set the bar high for myself as far as narrative trickery,” says Semple. And as much as she enjoys plotting and structure, Semple says her first draft has to come easy, even if it comes from a place of personal pain. “The best feeling is when I say, ‘oh, shit, I really did it this time and written myself into a corner.’ I’m never intimidated by that—it gives me this wicked energy I bring to my writing.”
The author will be signing at the Hachette booth (1716), today, 10–11 a.m.
This article appeared in the May 12, 2016 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.
