Things novelist Maria Semple loves about living in Seattle: Olympic Sculpture Park. The Hogsback Farm farmstand on Vashon Island. The Seattle Center fountain. Walking the Queen Anne loop. Driving across the Aurora Bridge when there's snow on the mountains. Ethan Stowell's restaurants; really, lots of restaurants. The hanging flower baskets all over town. ("I've never seen anyone water them, and I've never seen a dead one. It's a thing of mystery.")
Things Maria Semple doesn't love so much about living in Seattle: Denny Way. Drivers who don't pull into the intersection when turning left ("they just stay back, and then wait wait wait ... 'oh, it didn't work out, I'll just wait until next time.'") Various other things _ "There's so much I don't like" _ but you're going to have to read her books for those; she can't quite come up with them.
Yes, the author of "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," the hit 2012 comic novel that so deliciously skewered Seattle, has warmed up to her town. "Now that I've settled in, I really love it here," she said. "It feels like home." And she's written another novel in which Seattle plays a starring role: "Today Will Be Different" (Little, Brown and Company; $27).
"Bernadette," Semple said, came from a difficult transition. The daughter of screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr., she grew up in California and Colorado and eventually spent two decades working in Los Angeles as a writer and showrunner. Her extensive credits there included "Arrested Development," "Mad About You" and "Ellen."
The move to Seattle in 2008, with her boyfriend (television writer/producer George Meyer, best known for "The Simpsons") and young daughter, came with a career change to fiction writing _ and at first was a bumpy transition. "I had all of these negative thoughts about Seattle running through my mind," Semple said. "I had kind of perfected the rants in my head." (Lunch _ or, I suspect, any amount of time with Semple _ includes a number of thoroughly entertaining rants, starting with one about why on earth restaurants are suddenly putting poached eggs on everything. Spot-on, if you ask me.)
Those rants _ which, strangely, nobody seemed to want to hear at parties _ turned into an idea. "I thought there was something inherently funny about someone with a bunch of personal problems, somebody who's stuck as an artist, who instead of taking personal responsibility blamed an entire city of people she's never met. That seemed funny to me."
It was, and "Where'd You Go, Bernadette" _ an epistolary novel in which a Seattle architect and mom hilariously approaches a meltdown _ became a best-seller, complete with a movie deal.
"I was totally surprised," said Semple, of the book's success. "I'd written a book before (the novel "This One Is Mine," published in 2008) that I loved and thought was a good book. It didn't catch on. I was the same writer, I wasn't trying to do anything different." It's been fun, she said, to watch the book's reception from a distance.
"What happens is that when you write a book, the book is something to you. And then when it goes out into the world it turns into something else and you had no idea that was the book that you were writing. It kind of takes on a narrative of its own, and reflects back to you this image that you don't recognize."
Since the 2012 publication of "Bernadette," Semple said she hasn't really taken a break: After a long period of promotion for the book (including a paperback tour), she began working on "Today Will Be Different" about two years ago.
It is, like "Bernadette," a Seattle story, in which its main character, Eleanor, and her son Timby make their way through the city in the course of a very eventful day. (The boy's name came from a friend's two daughters, who named their hedgehog Timby. "One wanted to name him Bobby and one wanted to name him Timmy. I thought it was the cutest name I'd ever heard.")
The new book, Semple said, "is much more of Seattle, in a way. She's literally on the street." Among Eleanor's many stops: the downtown restaurant Lola, Mamnoon on Capitol Hill, the sculpture park, Jazz Alley, the downtown Gap, KeyArena. Though there's one fictional touch _ "I put a Costco where there's no Costco," in Magnolia _ it's otherwise "very real, very accurate about living here."
"Bernadette" readers should look closely for an unexpected walk-on, in a scene at Timby's school. "At the end of 'Bernadette,'" explained Semple, "she gives her house to Galer Street School, because they needed a new campus. She's in the book _ the lady architect who's explaining the renovations when Eleanor goes into the conference room, that's Bernadette."
Might Semple herself possibly make a similar cameo appearance in the movie of "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"? Too soon to say: Semple, who's a producer of the film, was mum on details. Cate Blanchett has been rumored to be in talks to play Bernadette, and writer/director Richard Linklater ("Boyhood") was reportedly attached as of last year. But in the movie business, nothing's certain until the cameras roll.
"I think we're getting close," Semple said. "We're making deals with people, and when those deals get finalized then we'll announce it. It seems like it's close, and it's very exciting." She doesn't think she'd like to write the screenplay herself: "It really needs to change dramatically as a form to get to the screen."
Lunch ends, and Semple has to rush off _ she's about to launch on a long book tour for "Today Will Be Different." It'll be awhile, she says, before she begins to write again.
"You can't plan for it _ it just has to happen. You have to let your life go where it's going to go, and you're going to meet the people you want to meet and be traumatized by the things that you're going to get traumatized by and be disappointed in a way that you don't expect, and all that stuff. And pretty soon there'll be some kind of tension, you know, and something that wants to get out. And then I'll write a book." A lot of us, it's fair to say, will be waiting.
