Where'd You Go, Bernadette: Reflections on Maria Semple's novel and Anxiety Attacks

I downloaded Where'd You Go, Bernadette, a novel by Maria Semple, months ago. Last October, if you want to know the truth, when I thought my life could still make room for books.

Just before we were out the door for our weekend visit with our son, I remembered that the book was idling on my iPad and grabbed the gizmo. iPad books are particularly effective in early morning hours in hotel rooms when you really don't want to wake your husband, but you can't sleep, either. Before the crack of dawn, in a Marriott, I started in on Bernadette.

This is the story of an imploding, MacArthur-winning architect (Bernadette) in a saturated town of too-many five-point intersections (Seattle) who has a TED talk star of a husband employed by Microsoft. It is the story of gossiping neighbors, mud slides, cruel interventions, and a very smart little girl who loses her mother and hopes that the fragments she assembles (email correspondence, letters, documents) will help her right her world.

It's satire. It's funny. It hurts. It is complex and sophisticated. It gets a little crazy and perhaps (for a few pages) self indulgent. And then it rights itself. I call this kind of risk-taking novel heroic. I marvel at the fluidity of the prose, despite Semple's calculated choice to tell her story in spliced segments.

I recommend.

I always quote from books I've liked, to help give the readers of this blog a sense of what they might be in for. Typically I choose passages for their literary spectaculariness. Today I choose the piece below because when I read it, late today, after 36 hours of intense work on no more than 1,600 words (1,600 words!!!), I cried for the precision of these sentences.

This is, indeed, how an anxiety attack feels. I know. Many nights of many weeks, I know for absolute sure. Sometimes the only thing that can save me is the face of my son or the garden outside my door.

Panic, as explicated by Maria Semple:

... Even sleeping makes my heart race! I'm lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader. It's a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in 2001, self-organized but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline. Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them. For instance, during the day I might have mused, Hey, I should pack more fresh fruit in Bee's lunch. That night, with the arrival of The Thumper, it becomes, I'VE GOT TO PACK MORE FRESH FRUIT IN BEE'S LUNCH!!! I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is the energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness.

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Devotions/Beth Kephart Poem

K. and I were talking about anxiety. I told her a story about a time, a few years ago, when the worst of it came over me, and I was saved—nothing else, just this—by the writing of poems. "Devotions" was the first poem in what became a lengthy poem cycle.

Devotions

The hawk came three months after the fox

had taken that one last lubricious

step onto my porch, a day of deer

unclasping the bracelet of themselves

across my lawn. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t been

sleeping well, had not been on the lookout

for the hawk or for the toad, the crow, the snake

the single cricket that pulls a hawk down from the sky.

Nor for an egg; I wasn’t looking for an egg —

the mind fighting the night and at war

with the age I have become, wishing I had learned color

instead of words, but then: This hawk, with that telling

streak of rust for a tail and those four pounds

at least of bird encasing bone and soul, in the morning

in my garden, where it was late in the season and things

had turned to seed and no one, nothing but a bird and I

could guess the garden’s lore. I liked the hawk,

therefore, from the start, and I asked its name,

and it looked straight through me, for my bones

were hollow and my soul was the suggestion of insomnia,

and we were alone, besides, each on the verge of excavating

secrets but choosing to amble instead, from the garden,

across the mud pocks, toward the Japanese maple,

side by side and counting benefactions, the hawk walking

the way hawks walk, and I in devout deliverance of dawn.

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