Seattle Explored

A new comic novel pokes fun at Seattle and its residents. We’ll settle in on Seattle.

Maria Semple is a very funny lady.  She wrote for Arrested Development, for Mad About You, for Saturday Night Live, for Ellen.  Now she’s writing about Seattle.  She’s got a big comic novel out with all kinds of family craziness.  But the setting is deep Seattle.  The Emerald City, locals call it.  Oz.

We think of Seattle as the heart of coolness.  Cool, coffee, grunge, mountains.  She’s got a tougher take.  Stinging.  Wickedly funny.  A send-up.

This hour, On Point:  we’ve got Maria Semple and a great crew out of the Emerald City to settle in, with affection and a cocked eye, on Seattle.
-Tom Ashbrook

Maria Semple, author of the new book Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

Dan Savage, writes the Savage Love sex advice column. He's the editorial director of Seattle’s alternative weekly, “The Stranger”

Knute Berger, editor at large and columnist for Seattle Magazine.

Jon Stone, executive director of Seattle's annual Bumbershoot music and arts festival.

The Stranger "And boy does Fox hate it here in the "dreary upper-left corner." She hates that her husband loves it so much, has become a "bike-riding, Subaru-driving, Keen-wearing alter ego" of his old self. She seethes over the five-way intersections and bucolic drivers, and the simple fact that she lives in a state that borders Idaho. She rages against the homeless people with a snotty, entitled air of wealth ("Why does every beggar have a pit bull?"). "

New York Times "Maria Semple made an instant, jarring discovery when she moved with her boyfriend and daughter from Los Angeles to Seattle, a city whose Patagonia-clad inhabitants like to talk about bicycling, the environment and the eternally dull question (in her opinion) of whether it might rain."

Seattle Times "If you're one of a long line of people waiting for your library copy of Maria Semple's hilarious new novel "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which sends up Seattle's new rich like nothing else, console yourself while you wait by viewing this "book trailer" (for the uninitiated, a "book trailer," like a movie trailer, is a short advertisement for an upcoming book)."

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