Go Gentle
Go Gentle
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Maria Semple on Go Gentle
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The philosophy, the move, and the drafts that kept dyingThe project began with genuine expertise. Semple had kept a daily Stoic practice for over a decade before she typed a word of the novel, which meant she could build Adora’s interior world from the inside rather than from a philosophy textbook. The question that still needed answering was what kind of woman would organize her entire life around an ancient school of thought.
Adora has had a trauma in her past. And at the time, when she’s much younger — it’s a flashback in the book, and it really paralyzes her and it makes her quit her job. And so when she discovers Stoicism, there’s this basic message in Stoicism which that there are no victims, that you are always 100% responsible for your happiness in this moment. And that, at the time, is very freeing for her... And I would say that the novel starts when maybe Stoicism starts to break down on her.
The Hollywood flashback, the section that makes Adora’s need for Stoicism legible, drew on specific incidents from Semple’s own years writing for television. She had carried those experiences without the right vocabulary until a cultural moment gave her one.
A lot of the details were true, and I was writing for TV on the Warner Bros lot and was overweight and hated myself for it and talked too much. I drew on all of that, but more than the details, it was my state of mind when I was starting out in Hollywood. I wanted to be inside the head of someone with bad values, who believed that externals could make them happy.
That state of mind, the hunger for status and belonging, is exactly what the Stoic flashback is designed to anatomize. Without it, Adora’s philosophy would look like a personality quirk rather than a survival strategy.
The version of the book that finally worked required Semple to move cities and end a long relationship first. Earlier drafts, written in Seattle while that relationship was still ending, stalled around fifty pages in every time. She returned to the manuscript in New York with a single change of premise about who Adora actually was.
That is really what I wanted to write about is a woman who is of a certain age and kind of her best years maybe should be behind her. But there’s this restlessness inside of her where she’s just getting started. And so that’s really what I wanted to explore that I think in the beginning of the book, Adora does believe that she is going to go gentle into that good night.
How she wrote it
Pencils, beat sheets, and the plot she built backwardBefore the current draft, there were many others, each abandoned at roughly the same point. Semple has described the experience of those failed drafts in a way that distinguishes forced effort from honest work, and the distinction matters: she went back to the manuscript anyway, each time.
I’ve written many drafts of Go Gentle and abandoned it many times only to go back to it. With the drafts that weren’t working, the writing process felt like I was trying to strangle the life into something.
Once the working draft was underway, Semple had to solve an architectural problem she had built into the premise. Adora belongs to a coven, a small circle of women friends, and those relationships are central to who Adora is. But having present, engaged companions on the page would neutralize nearly every scene in the plot.
One of my beliefs is that your protagonists can’t have friends. You don’t want your character going to someone with their problems. The minute you have a friend, they’ll say, ‘Let’s have a glass of wine’ and talk you down. The last thing a plot needs is for someone to realize, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t act crazy.’
The Hollywood flashback was not in Semple’s original plan for the book. She built it after the present-day Adora was already on the page, reasoning backward from the philosophy to the wound that would make the philosophy necessary. The process reversed the usual order of character construction.
The more that I wrote about Adora’s Stoicism, the more I understood that it had to be an overcorrection for something. So the kind of unsexy answer is that the Hollywood section is reverse-engineered for what the story needs. I needed to see her being young and full of desire, but the wrong type of desire: for status, for money, for fame, for being in the cool crowd.
Plot construction is the craft element Semple returns to most insistently in interviews about the book, and the insistence carries mild frustration: she considers it her strongest skill and finds it the one interviewers skip over in favor of theme and voice.
I always want to talk about what a great plotter I am. I’m very proud of my plotting. And I think that that’s my great strength as a novelist... Plot is a real sleight of hand, and I’d say that almost takes more work than anything.
The voice that finally unlocked the working draft arrived as a temperamental shift rather than a structural one. Semple had been writing Adora as grim and shut down, and the change that broke the book open was simpler than any architectural fix. She described the moment in a video interview with WNYC.
It was really just her voice and her general good cheer and optimism and contentment that I discovered, and that’s what unlocked it for me. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
What the philosophy couldn’t fixSemple is not writing about Stoicism from outside, as a novelist who researched a subject. She has practiced it daily for roughly twelve years, which means she also knows where it runs out. The gap she identifies is not a critique of the philosophy so much as an honest accounting of its historical blind spots.
When Stoicism was formed, they didn’t understand psychology; they had no understanding of triggers from my childhood – it doesn’t address the stuff underneath for someone who was never loved as a child and feels that viscerally and deeply. So that’s a major hole.
That hole is not abstract in the novel. Adora’s philosophy saves her after the assault, and then it calcifies into a method for keeping grief at a safe distance. The book’s plot begins when that distance becomes impossible to maintain.
On what the book is wrestling with
Stoicism as rescue and as evasionSemple anticipated the most common misreading of Stoicism before readers even opened the book. The philosophy’s popular reputation as emotional suppression is nearly the opposite of what its ancient practitioners argued, and that gap between reputation and reality is load-bearing for Adora’s character.
I think people think it’s grin and bear it. But the idea of Stoicism is to change your perspective so you never have to grin and bear it. So basically, you’re looking at life through a lens where you’re happy with whatever fate delivers you. So whatever happens, you can roll with it very easily.
Semple is in her late fifties and wrote the book from that vantage point, which gave the project its argument. The cultural expectation that single women of a certain age should be winding down rather than igniting struck her as something worth writing against directly, and Adora is the vehicle for that argument.
That is really what I wanted to write about is a woman who is of a certain age and kind of her best years maybe should be behind her. But there’s this restlessness inside of her where she’s just getting started. And so that’s really what I wanted to explore that I think in the beginning of the book, Adora does believe that she is going to go gentle into that good night.
What she wants us to sit with
Loving better as the point of the whole thingSemple has been careful in interviews not to let the Stoicism theme swallow the novel’s emotional center. Whatever the philosophy provides Adora, and whatever it fails to provide, the book is ultimately organized around something older and simpler. She said this plainly in the Oprah’s Book Club video conversation.
I think ultimately this is a book about love and loving better. And I think that that really should be what art does, you know, is make you want to love better. [paraphrased from audio]