More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Since the late 1990s, our admissions department has been working with Yale’s PACE (Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise) Center to develop a hard measure of the soft skills required to adjust to the academic and social challenges of boarding school.
“You’re bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.”
You spent ten years of your life and billions of dollars inventing something so people don’t have to live their own lives.
All you need to know about Antarctica is it’s three horizontal stripes. On the bottom, there’s the stripe for the water, which is anywhere from black to dark gray. And on top of that, there’s a stripe for the land, which is usually black or white. Then there’s a stripe for the sky, which is some kind of gray or blue.
There were ebony beaches dusted with snow, and sometimes there was a lone emperor penguin, giant, with orange cheeks, standing on an iceberg, and you had no idea how he got there, or how he was going to get off, or if he even wanted to get off.
“I think my favorite part of Antarctica is just looking out.” “You know why?” Dad asked. “When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It’s the same as a runner’s high.
I never considered myself a great architect. I’m more of a creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares.
Do you know how absolutely exotic it is that you haven’t been corrupted by fashion and pop culture?
The book has a very playful structure. Do you think it works? Why do you think the author chose it rather than a more straightforward, traditional structure? Think about other books with unusual structures and how their formats influenced your reading experience.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette is, at its core, a story about a woman who disappears, both literally and figuratively.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a social satire, which is to say that it explains what is sick and sad about American life while making you laugh….
Where’d You Go, Bernadette is also a compassionate look at family dysfunction, the paralysis of genius, and good old-fashioned parental love. Cleverly constructed and brilliantly executed, Semple has driven this one home with great authority and has proven, once again, that she ranks among contemporary literature’s finest satirists.”
Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a crazy quilt of an epistolary novel,
An eccentric but feel-good mother-daughter story.”
