Bernadette Fox is not your average class mom. While other parents at Galer Street School are deeply involved in the school’s activities, the fundraising, the class trips, Bernadette just drops her fifteen-year-old daughter off and picks her up trying to avoid any extraneous human contact. She doesn’t have a job. She isn’t trying to update their eccentric house, a former boarding school that they picked up for a song when Bernadette refused to move in to any of Seattle’s Craftsman homes.
Her husband Elgie works for Microsoft, and while other MS wives are completely charmed by the MS lifestyle, Bernadette couldn’t care less. She just spends time alone in her trailer located behind their house and writes long, rambling emails to Manjula Kapoor in India, the assistant that Bernadette pays 75 cents an hour to take on her personal erranding, including organizing their family trip to Antarctica (a gift for their daughter for keeping her grades up), finding her the strongest possible seasickness medicine, and ordering a giant sign for her backyard to taunt a fellow (and irritating) Galer Street mom.
After a series of rather entertaining and slightly menacing incidents, Elgie decides it’s time to make some changes in his family. He holds an intervention for Bernadette, to try to get her the help she needs. But instead of accepting gracefully and getting help, she disappears. And it’s up to her daughter, Bee, to figure out what happened to her mother and bring her back home.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is a fun story of a woman at a crossroads in her life. Told through emails, letters, faxes, and even a police report, this novel is held together with the charming narrative of young Bee Branch, Bernadette’s daughter. Where Bernadette is difficult to love or even understand as a character, Bee is an open heart and a generous soul, whose wise and witty observations elevate this book into a must-read. Or, a must listen.
I have been meaning to read this one for months, and I just didn’t carve out the time for it. So instead I grabbed the audiobook from Audible and listened to it. It’s read beautifully by actress Kathleen Wilhoite (who also has a lovely singing voice; I was not expecting that!). I thought the book would be difficult to listen to, because of its epistolary format (the letters and emails), but Wilhoite just kept drawing me in, and I focused easily on the story.
Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is an engaging, honest, funny, heart-warming story of family, love, art, and genius that I could not stop listening to. Highly recommended, no matter how you decide to read it!