“I would have been horrified to start out writing a Hollywood novel,” Maria Semple said.
Her statement comes as no surprise, given the fact that Semple spent 15 years writing for television upon her graduation from Barnard College in 1986. But just last month, her debut novel, This One is Mine, was published by Little, Brown and Company.
The influence her television career had on her prose isn’t lost on Semple. She explained how she approaches novel writing the same way she approaches television writing: “In television writing, you become ruthless about story.”
This is probably why none of Semple’s characters are doing too well. She describes the protagonist of the novel, Violet, as “in bad shape”—in order to escape an unhappy marriage, she plunges into an affair with a money-guzzling junkie named Teddy. Her husband, a wealthy music executive, is at the peak of his career and the end of his nerves. They have fights over yoga retreats and dead animals in the Jacuzzi.
It all seems right out of television—but a critical detail distinguishes this tale from a typical cable series.
According to Semple, because actors are unwilling to come off badly, characters in television shows must usually appeal to the audience. “That you start to resent,” Semple admitted. Semple had no such commitment when writing her novel, however. “I know how to make characters sympathetic. I just didn’t do that here [in my novel].” She clearly relishes her control over her print characters and believes that their craziness makes them fun to read about.
Yet this craziness is somewhat grounded in reality. “I started with what I knew,” Semple said. Violet, for instance, is partly based upon Semple herself—she is a former screenwriter with a young child who lives in Los Angeles on Semple’s old street. The rest of the character arose from the story line, which drove Semple’s writing. “I write in scenes ... I don’t know another way to get characters from one room to another,” she explained.
So how did Semple get involved with television writing before novel writing? It was partly because of her father, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who wrote screenplays and, briefly, television scripts. Semple visited the sets of her father’s movies as a child. “Just knowing something like that existed—as a job—brought me most of the way there,” she said. A few years later, during her studies at Barnard, she wrote a screenplay.
Darren Star, the creator of Sex and the City, offered Semple her first television writing job with his then-newest project, Beverly Hills 90210, upon her graduation. Since then, she has also contributed to Ellen, Mad About You, Arrested Development, and Saturday Night Live. Yet throughout her television writing years, Semple maintained a lingering romance with novels. “My agent was laughing at me,” she said, “because I said I would love to become a successful enough novelist to go back and teach English.”
Although Semple misses her friends in television, she said the business has gotten tougher since she started, and she has no plans to go back. “Especially in Hollywood, in order to succeed, the career really needs to be your identity, because there’s way too much headwind and humiliation and pain involved in it that if there wasn’t a really dark, unhealthy piece of you that needed to succeed in this, you’d say, ‘Screw this, I don’t need it anymore.’”
“I’ve never been happier than when I was sitting and writing this novel,” Semple said. The newly minted author is currently at work on her second book about a family in Aspen, Colorado.
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