Adora Hazzard is living her best life: divorced, with a comfortable New York City apartment on the Upper West Side and a high-paying—if strange—job as a philosophy tutor for the twin boys of an uberwealthy family. Adora and her teenage daughter have a loving, though typically fraught, relationship. And Adora has her “coven,” her tongue-in-cheek term for the group of similarly aged single women who live in the neighboring apartments and share friendship, symphony tickets and groceries.
Everything in Adora’s life is good, manageable and predictable. As a follower of the Stoic school of philosophy, she believes that the key to happiness is not wanting anything other than a virtuous existence. But what will happen to her convictions when she’s met with something that’s very hard not to want?
Maria Semple’s fourth novel, Go Gentle, is a dizzying treat from start to finish. It should be noted that Semple has a lot in common with her character, Adora—starting with her complete but clear-eyed love of the Big Apple. Speaking to BookPage from her New York City apartment, she says, “There’s everything to love about [New York] if you just don’t look at most things.” (Adora agrees, noting in the novel that “Central Park, no matter how fresh-smelling it may look, you take one whiff and it’s piss all the way down.”)
“There’s no desperation happening here in New York City with a single woman. We’re all doing just fine, fellas.”
Semple is best known for her bestselling novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, a biting comedy set in Seattle that was made into a 2019 movie starring Cate Blanchett. The author lived in Seattle for many years, but moved to New York after a long-term relationship ended three years ago.
“I never really loved Seattle. You might be able to tell from my writing—there are clues!” Semple says. “When it was time to move on with life, it felt like I should move on with a new city as well. It’s been the best decision I could have made.”
Semple is a believer in writing what you know, and her lead characters always have at least a touch of herself in them.
“I probably wouldn’t embark upon anything that I was starting from zero,” she says. “That’s not the kind of novelist I am. There are people who are that type of novelist, who write historical fiction and read 15 books or biographies, and that’s just not my thing. I’m always just trying to tell my story.”
That means Semple will always “write about a woman my age, living where I live, who’s struggling with some deep core thing that I’m struggling with,” she says. “I don’t try to change that. I don’t start from something that I can’t fully write with authority.”
Another aspect of the book that was inspired by Semple’s life, and the source of many of its funniest and most relatable scenes, is the coven. The women in Adora’s apartment building have practical reasons to share their lives with one another: How many slices of bread can one woman eat before the loaf molds? But more than that, the coven provides a chance for Semple to touch on a topic that comes up an awful lot among single women at midlife: the false perception that they all must be miserable.
“I feel like it just comes up in conversation all the time with my women friends,” Semple says. “After I moved, I loved my life in New York. Half my friends are single women my age, who are all just 100% happy being single. When you get divorced and you’re in the world, and you’re in your late 50s, you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ll be another desperate single woman in New York City.’ And there’s no desperation happening here in New York City with a single woman. I’m just telling you that. We’re all doing just fine, fellas. And we’re so happy.”
Something else Semple shares with Adora: She, too, practices Stoicism. Semple has been drawn to Stoicism for a dozen years, and though the philosophy can be mischaracterized as promoting coldness or emotional detachment, she doesn’t see it that way. In the novel, Adora sets the record straight thus: “It’s not Keep Calm and Carry On. It’s Change Your Perception So You Never Have to Keep Calm and Carry On. Stoics are very passionate people. The key is to be correct in your passions.” Accordingly, Semple wanted to bring Stoicism to fiction in a lighthearted rather than heavy-handed way.
“It seemed kind of inherently funny to me,” Semple says, “someone who denies desire [in order] to be happy. This really basic concept that wanting what you don’t have is the source of misery. It sounds crazy and radical, but it’s really not. It’s really pretty basic, I think. When you become a mother, you’re supposed to put other people first: the child first, the partner first. You’re expected to kind of step back and deny ambition and passions of your own.
“That was something that I thought would be really interesting to explore: Why do you renounce desire? And then what’s the worst situation I can put you in?”
Enter Digby, an extremely handsome and charismatic man whom Adora meets cute at the theater. Though Adora hates to admit it, she’s thrilled when the crackling energy between them leads to a flirty dinner and a trip to his hotel room—but it soon becomes clear that theirs was no chance meeting. The adventure that ensues is an absolutely delightful caper, complete with art heists, deeply buried secrets from Adora’s past and some very crossed wires. Digby brings out a flirtatious side of Adora that she’d tamped down years before, after her divorce. Their dialogue provides some of the most irresistible moments in a book full of charm.
“I do kind of amuse myself at the things I’m willing to do in a book.”
“It was really fun to write,” Semple says, “because until then I didn’t realize she was sexy and could flirt and could, like, bring it. She really says some kind of bold, shocking things, and I think that he brings that out in her. I think she kind of falls in love with herself in his presence.”
Like Semple’s previous novels, Go Gentle is rollicking and fast-paced, sometimes almost breathlessly so. One minute Adora is in New York, the next we’re flashing back to her time as a TV writer in Los Angeles. Then, toward the end of the story, we find ourselves in Paris with Adora, her daughter and a few unlikely visitors.
Semple knows her readers will follow along on the journey. And she’s put a lot of thought into when to release information to make the book the most satisfying.
“Pacing and revealing information is fully top of mind for me,” she says. “Someone once described narration as the elegant dispensation of information. And a lot of times, as an author, I don’t think of myself as a storyteller. I think of myself as a story withholder.”
Her goal for her writing, Semple says, is to get readers “to the end of my book. Are they gonna want to turn the page? And then turn the next page, and then turn the next page?”
To achieve that page-turning quality, which her books have become known for, Semple delights in “cramming together” plot elements you wouldn’t expect to find in one story. “That’s kind of one of the high wire acts that I really enjoy as a writer: the process of feeling like I’m in this impossible corner, and what have I done? And then writing my way out of it.”
After four novels, Semple has learned to trust herself as a writer and to trust her readers to embrace her storytelling.
“I’m finally starting to understand that the thing that I do is actually pretty unique,” she says. “I do this thing that’s very me, you know, it’s funny, it’s really propulsive. And it’s a complicated woman. In everything I write, I’m thinking, ‘OK, now, this one’s too crazy. No, now I’ve taken it too far. But I know I haven’t because I’m really trying to ground it all in emotional truth. I do kind of amuse myself at the things I’m willing to do in a book. I put things in, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s not staying in there.’ And then it just stays, because I read it, and I think, ‘Why not? I like it!’ ”
Read our review of Go Gentle.
Photo of Maria Semple by Beowulf Sheehan.
