Novel pokes fun at Seattle houses and style

Seattle, known in the literary world for its kinky, bondage-loving billionaire in the Fifty Shades series, is featured in a new novel that describes our city as an “unfashionable, bewildering place.”

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” tells the fictional story of Bernadette Fox, a woman who’s relocated from Los Angeles to Seattle and is frustrated by the city.

Author, Maria Semple, can relate to the character she’s created. Seattle is “just not a funny place,” Semple told The New York Times.

She moved from LA to Seattle with her husband and daughter who was just entering preschool.

“I was immediately thrust into the hyperactive, PC parenting culture. I felt like I was the disheveled, antisocial mom all the other mothers judged,” she says.

“I was in a miserable mind frame, and I found that I was driving around and all I was thinking about were funny things about how awful Seattle was. I would do these riffs in my head and I would polish them in my head. It was poisonous and self-pitying.”

Her character Bernadette considers Seattle to be an “earnest, unfashionable, bewildering place” where five-way intersections clog traffic, Microsoft is Big Brother, invasive blackberry bushes are a mysterious citywide plague and Craftsman houses are annoyingly everywhere.

“Turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman,” Bernadette rants.

“It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.”

I live in a Craftsman. She’s got a point. She also complaints about vagrants, Alaskans, drivers, Canada, Christians, the “gnats” in the PTA at her daughter’s school, the entire state of Idaho, and anyone “provincial” enough to think Seattle’s is a satisfying place to live.

Semple, a comedy writer who worked on the television shows “Arrested Development” and “Mad About You” says her opinion of Seattle changed from the time she arrived, to the moment she finished the first draft of her book.

“I was starting to like a lot of things about Seattle. The chill was melting and I realized I was growing out of this phase I was in. Now I love it here and I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” she says.

By LINDA THOMAS

Photo courtesy publisher Little, Brown and Company