Our host Vick Hope is joined by Maria Semple.
Maria is a novelist and screenwriter. Her novels – Today Will Be Different, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and This One Is Mine – have been translated into forty languages. Where’d You Go, Bernadette has sold over 200 thousand copies in the UK alone and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2013. Maria used to work in television, producing and writing for sitcoms and comedy specials such as Arrested Development, The George Carlin Show and Mad About You, which earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination. Go Gentle, her most recent novel, is out now.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Maria’s five most influential books by women.
“I love this book so much and I love Catherine so much and, Barbara Trapido, we don’t know her over in the United States, largely. I was at a library book sale and there was a dollar table of old library books that they were selling, and on the jacket, it said, ‘better than Jane Austen’ and it was so outrageous to me that someone was calling this better than Jane Austen and I was like, well, I’ll pay a dollar to prove that person wrong, you know? I read it and just was so blown away by this book and by the humour of it, the quirkiness of it, the originality of it. I’ve returned to the book often and what’s so special about the book is the character of Catherine because she’s young and her intellect is so giant and her heart is so open. And I feel like she’s the only one who doesn’t know.”
“You know, I’ll say what’s happening now with her is that she’s having a moment and, I know, they’re reissuing her books so I really think it’s going to come to the forefront. People are going to really start to read them. I don’t even know how I found out about them. I’d never heard of her. I’d never heard of these books. There’s a book by James Salter called The Light Years, and he’s very much in the canon over in the United States so when I heard that some woman wrote a book called The Light Years, you were like, yeah, no, there’s already a light years and it’s written by a man, you know, which is terrible that I thought that. And then you read this and you’re like, move over, James Salter. There’s a new light year. that’s just dominated. With the reissue, I do believe it’s going to be a word of mouth thing. What I will say, it’s one of those books that I’ve told everybody about and people just flip out and they’re like, I’m on book seven, you know, after like three weeks. It’s crazy.”
Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness
by Epictetus
Find out more“Well, I really love [Stoic] philosophy and I study it almost every morning. I didn’t do it today, but normally I sit down and I read the Stoics. I decide what virtues I’m going to work on that day, which sounds very churchy, but it’s not. It’s just, you know, a virtue could be focus. It could be modesty. It could be kindness. It could be not casting blame and just taking responsibility for yourself. So I’ve written this strange little 70-page book for myself that’s my whole self-help primer that’s based on stoicism. And it’s like protocols before a Zoom call of what to do to centre myself. It’s all this stuff and it’s all based in stoicism. And it’s just really fun for me. It’s something that I love and I feel like I can kind of roll with anything and handle anything.”
“I think it’s a perfect example of why I never liked to describe books that I recommend because if I go, this is the most incredible book. It’s hard to do it justice, isn’t it? And it just sounds depressing and it’s about a grandmother who has to raise her grandchild because the daughter’s a drug addict and people are like, yeah, no, I’m not going to be reading that. She’s so winning. She’s so noble. And she’s so funny.”
“I only recently read it and and I am a huge David Copperfield fan, I love Dickens so much and I really felt like take David Copperfield’s name out of your mouth. Yeah, like, no, you’re not allowed to just skim off of David Copperfield, but so many people were like, you’ve got to read the book, you’ve got to read the book. But I was just too proud and of my own opinions to think that I could let in somebody’s interpretation of David Copperfield. But it was, it is so funny and it’s just the voice and the attitude. Again, I think that it’s very similar to Loved and Missed, that is what I think the charm of the book is, it’s the attitude of the person towards the events, right? Is that these are harrowing events, but there’s such a music to the way that she writes and to his voice and it’s just so hilarious.”
