In Maria Semple’s new novel, “Go Gentle,” Adora Hazzard used to be a TV comedy writer.
These days, the single mother of a teen girl is a working philosopher. Hazzard works for a fabulously wealthy family that has both a museum and a pair of boys she tutors in the ways of history’s great thinkers.
But things go awry when Hazzard falls in love – and into a potential international art heist. As she tries applying the principles of Stoicism to her emotions, Hazzard plunges deeper into her new relationship and into the dangers of the scheme she stumbled upon.
Semple, who also lives on the Upper West Side, wrote for “Mad About You,” “Saturday Night Live,” and “Arrested Development” before writing hit novels, such as “Where’d You’d Go, Bernadette.” “Go Gentle” was chosen as the latest pick for Oprah’s Book Club.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Q. Where did the idea of a philosopher protagonist come from?
I’ve had a pretty robust Stoic practice for about 12 years. And from there, I got interested in other philosophers and started reading and expanding. I knew I could write with authority about Stoicism since I know it inside and out.
Q. What’s the most helpful part of Stoicism for you, and what’s the hardest part to apply to real life?
The basic premise is to differentiate between what you can and cannot control and that’s second nature to me now, though it’s not that hard for anybody. The hardest thing for me still is to bring detachment to the things that are outside my control. It feels almost impossible to live in this society and have pure equanimity about things that are not in your control. But it helps to understand the difference between good and bad emotions. Any negative feeling you have is because of a false value judgment about what’s going to make you happy, and that’s profound. If I get a bad review and I get angry or feel sorry for myself, that’s a bad judgment by me to think that matters. All negative emotions come from a faulty judgment about reality.
But when Stoicism was formed, they didn’t understand psychology; they had no understanding of triggers from my childhood – it doesn’t address the stuff underneath for someone who was never loved as a child and feels that viscerally and deeply. So that’s a major hole.
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Q. Early on, Adora makes a big deal about trying to form a “coven,” or gathering, of single women of a certain age with dynamic personalities into one apartment building. But that largely fades away as the plot builds. What happened?
I love the idea of the coven, and I always talk about it with my friends. It was very much alive in my imagination and I thought it would be fun to write about, but one of my beliefs is that your protagonists can’t have friends.
You don’t want your character going to someone with their problems. The minute you have a friend, they’ll say, “Let’s have a glass of wine” and talk you down. The last thing a plot needs is for someone to realize, “Maybe I shouldn’t act crazy.” You need the character to be in a corner and therefore act in ways that advance the plot.
Everyone loves the coven, and I feel like there’s disappointment that there’s not more coven. But I decided to make them off-screen characters that you never see. At the end, there’s even a moment when Digby says about Adora’s friends,” I’m starting to believe they don’t exist,” and she says, “No, they’re here somewhere,” which is funny to me anyway.
I also felt I didn’t want to write that book. Nothing against women’s fiction, but I’m not one of those women who say, “We don’t need men in our lives” or scheming to get a man in their lives, and they sit around and support each other. I’m not interested in those conversations. So that felt like I’d be writing another kind of book that I wasn’t interested in writing.
Q. There’s an extended flashback to Adora’s experiences writing for TV in her twenties. How much of that was autobiographical?
A lot of the details were true, and I was writing for TV on the Warner Bros lot and was overweight and hated myself for it and talked too much. I drew on all of that, but more than the details, it was my state of mind when I was starting out in Hollywood.
I wanted to be inside the head of someone with bad values, who believed that externals could make them happy. That’s what I really wanted then and I really wanted to be inside of a woman starting in a really misogynistic business, who would internalize the misogyny herself and tries to align herself to power and who suffers because of it.
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Adora is driven by desire for status and money and acceptance when she’s young. She just goes along to get along, which is corrupt, but the system is corrupt. It’s not that she’s a bad person. The Stoics talk about resisting conformity, and that’s a really hard thing to do, especially when you’re young.
Q. A lot of this book feels like it was drawn from your life. Are the mother-daughter dynamics from you?
I had a conversation with my daughter where she was trying to explain the word “rizz” to me, and I said, “Look, that baby has rizz.” And she said, “Mom, babies don’t have rizz,” like I was a child molester. And she said the doorman in our building has rizz. And then I got it. And that all went in the book.
Maria Semple in Conversation with Jennette McCurdy, sponsored by Vroman’s
When: 7 p.m., April 27
Where: Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena
Information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/maria-semple-discusses-signs-go-gentle-tickets-1981380689981?aff=oddtdtcreator