Maria Semple
speaker
519 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 26 Jun
Maria Semple’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So I really was so excited about stoicism that I thought I really wanted to get inside that character.
And so at first when I wrote it, I was writing the character as kind of, like I was saying, emotionally shut down, a little grim.
Right.
And perhaps that reflected where I was at the time of my life, but I kept kind of trying to write from this point of view.
Exactly, yes.
I was, yeah, just like ending a long-term relationship.
And this was just the voice that I was writing in.
But I kept writing maybe by when I get to 50 pages, the kind of souffle would collapse, so to speak, because the voice just wasn't fun to write.
It wasn't fun to read.
And so I abandoned the book, I just put it away.
And then my relationship ended and I moved to New York City and I started life fresh in the city.
I was totally dazzled by New York and kind of was surprised at how much I love my new life here.
I kept thinking, God, there's so many cool things about that book that I really wanna get back to and I wish I could figure it out.
And when it was time to start writing, it occurred to me, why does a stoic have to be so grim and unfeeling?
What if I make her, what if I make my character like a stoic sage and make her just really happy?
And so I changed her name, I changed her city, I changed her attitude, and then the book just kind of broke open for me that this was this woman who had kind of figured out
crack the code to happiness.
Yes, and it was actually really hard to do that.
Again, for a long time, I think in the early stages of the book that weren't working out, I really felt like I had to explain what it was, and it just was kind of dreary, and that's not why you read a novel, to have someone explain philosophy to you.
That's right.
Showing 161–180 of 519 · page 9 of 26
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