Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Where’d You Go, Bernadette, published in 2012, is the second novel by Maria Semple, a former television writer who worked on shows such as Mad About You and Arrested Development. A bestseller praised by numerous critics as one of the best books of the year, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a fast-paced comic novel with a complex narrative structure. The book follows an epistolary format, meaning the text is largely composed of letters, emails, and other found documents. The events of the novel are recounted from multiple points of view by a large cast of characters, employing a wide range of voices and formats. The novel is set in contemporary Seattle and incorporates real places and personalities both in Seattle and beyond.

The novel tells the story of Bernadette Fox, a former architect living in Seattle with her husband, Elgin Branch, an engineer at Microsoft and presenter of a famed TED Talk on artificial intelligence, and their teenaged daughter, Bee. Bernadette, though close to Bee, has become increasingly withdrawn from everyone else, employing a “virtual assistant,” supposedly based in Delhi and named Manjula, to manage her daily life. The family lives in a former school for wayward girls, which Bernadette intended to renovate into a functional family home but which she has instead allowed to fall into ruin.