“The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, “What’s most important is for you to understand it’s not your fault.” You’ll notice that wasn’t even the question” (3). This is how Where’d You Go, Bernadette starts: with Bee Branch letting us know that her mom disappeared two days before Christmas. And then we jump back to November, to the start of things: Bee gets her report card. She’s gotten perfect grades for her whole time at the Galer Street School, and she reminds her parents that they told her she that if she got perfect grades, she could have anything she wanted as a graduation present. What she wants turns out to be a trip to Antarctica, which her mom, Bernadette, proceeds to start organizing, with the help of her new outsourced personal assistant. But Bernadette hardly leaves the house, and the prospect of being stuck on an Antarctic cruise with a lot of probably-annoying strangers sounds pretty terrible. And, meanwhile, relations with the family’s next-door neighbor, whose son is in Bee’s class at school, are increasingly strained. Crazy thing piles on crazy thing (a fight over blackberry bushes, a mudslide, a misunderstanding about prescription drugs, accidental involvement with the Russian mafia), and Bee’s dad plans to stage an intervention. But things don’t quite go as planned.
The book, then, is the story of all these events leading up to a moment of crisis, and then the mystery of Bernadette’s disappearance: but it’s also a portrait of Bernadette, her current self and her past self, pieced together by her daughter using the evidence she has. The book is semi-epistolary, with much of the narrative consisting of emails between Bernadette and her personal assistant, emails between the next-door-neighbor and her best friend (who ends up being assigned to be Bee’s dad’s administrative assistant, too), and various other notes and memos. The story is simultaneously a very funny satire and a serious story about what happens when a woman loses herself: Bernadette was an accomplished architect who hasn’t created anything since Bee was born: Bernadette has, in a sense, been gone long before she disappears.
I like that the book ends with Bernadette’s own words, in a letter from her to Bee explaining things, and I love the way the book shifts, at the end, from satire to something else, and how the language shifts with it. I like how Bernadette finds herself as an artist again, how she starts talking about what she sees: how she goes from ranting about Seattleites and Canadians to talking about the beauty of icebergs, like this:
I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings impossible arched like out of a world’s fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman’s shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit’s cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black. (314-315)
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