Maria Semple

Maria Semple is the bestselling author of Today Will Be Different (2016), Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012), and This One is Mine (2008). Her novels have been translated into over 30 languages. Before writing fiction, Maria wrote for the TV shows Arrested Development, Mad About You, Ellen, 90210, and others. 

Where’d You Go, Bernadette, an international bestseller, spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list and made over a dozen year-end best lists. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and received the Alex Award from the American Library Association. It was turned into a 2019 film directed by Richard Linklater and starring Cate Blanchett. Today Will Be Different was an instant international bestseller and was featured on the cover of the New York Times book review. It, too, made over a dozen year-end best lists.  

Maria Semple spent her early years traveling around Europe with her bohemian parents, but that ended abruptly when her father, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., finished a pilot for Batman while living in Torremolinos, Spain. He airmailed it in, they shot it, and the family moved to Los Angeles. After the Batman TV series and feature, Lorenzo went on to write a bunch of movies. The family moved to Aspen, Colorado, in the early ‘70s. Maria attended boarding school at Choate Rosemary and college at Barnard, where she majored in English and loved it.  

After graduating from Barnard, Maria moved to Los Angeles and wrote screenplays that never got made and TV shows that did. After having a baby with George Meyer, Maria, an avowed English major at heart, quit TV and gave fiction a try. The result was This One is Mine, published in 2008 by Little, Brown. That same year, Maria, George, and their little daughter moved to Seattle. It was a difficult adjustment for Maria, which became the basis for her novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette.  

It was published in 2012 to unanimous critical acclaim. In 2016 Today Will Be Different was published. It, too, enjoyed bestseller status and critical praise. Maria loves teaching and spends as much time as she can do so. Currently, she’s at work on many projects in various stages of coming together or falling apart. Time will tell which.