September 2021. Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals including Denver Quarterly, the Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and the Cimarron Review, and she is a recipient of residencies at Hambidge, Playa, and the Spring Creek Project. She has a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2014 and a Special Mention in the 2016 Pushcart Prize anthology. Previously the managing editor of the Missouri Review, she is now managing editor of the Worcester Review, a publication of the Worcester County Poetry Association.
At Electric Lit McIntyre tagged seven novels about "main characters with no siblings, but plenty of problems," including:
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria SempleRead about another entry on the list.
Bee, the 13-year-old only child who narrates Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, is brilliant, which is no surprise considering her parents. Her father, an engineer at Microsoft, delivered the “fourth most-watched TED talk” of all time about a tiny wearable device he invented that lets users move objectswith their minds. Her mother, Bernadette, won a Macarthur award for her work in sustainable architecture but now lives a reclusive, phobic existence in the family home, a decaying girls’ school she had planned to renovate. Blackberry brambles poke through the floors, and Seattle’s rains penetrate the roof. After a failed intervention, Bernadette disappears, and Bee determines to locate her.
Just as Bernadette combined readymade materials like salvaged steel beams, trimmings from landscaping, and discarded doorknobs in her buildings, Bee presents her narrative as an assemblage of gossipy emails from parents at the private school Bee attends, meeting notes, press releases, letters, and magazine articles. Where’d You Go Bernadette moves propulsively due to the mystery at its heart, suggested in the title: Where is Bee’s mother? Is she alive or dead? Bee is convinced she knows the answer, and we readers fly through the pages to see if she is right.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette is among Francesca Segal's seven best books to prepare for motherhood, Kelly Simmons's six books to read with your teen or twentyish daughter, Jeff Somers's top five novels whose main characters are shut-ins and five books that use cultural anthropology to brilliant effect and top five novels featuring runaway parents, Heidi Fiedler's thirty-three books to read with your mother, the Star-Tribune's eight top funny books for dire times, Chrissie Gruebel's seven great books for people who love Modern Family, Charlotte Runcie's ten best bad mothers in literature, Joel Cunningham's seven notable epistolary novels and Chrissie Gruebel's five top books for readers inspired by Nora Ephron.
--Marshal Zeringue
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