SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Adora Hazzard is a stoic philosopher. Part of her job is to be a moral trainer to the tween sons of a wealthy family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a quiet, fulfilling life enriched by what she calls a coven of middle-aged female friends and her teen daughter. And one night at the ballet, Adora falls into conversation with Digby. Gets drawn into a world of black market art, arms deals, secret meetings and cross border intrigue. "Go Gentle" is the new novel from Maria Semple, bestselling author of "Where'd You Go, Bernadette?" She joins us from our studios in New York.
Thanks so much for being with us.
MARIA SEMPLE: Thank you for having me, Scott.
SIMON: You have Adora make a point early on - Stoicism isn't what a lot of us think it is, is it?
SEMPLE: 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.
SIMON: And what draws Adora to the real Stoicism?
SEMPLE: 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 to feel like it's up to me to make my life as happy and fulfilled as I can. And so that, for the time being, for many years, actually, really helps her and sustains her. And I would say that the novel starts when maybe Stoicism starts to break down on her.
SIMON: Yeah. Well, what happens when she meets Digby? What fire does that begin to set off?
SEMPLE: Part of Stoicism - and I think it's - there's this component in Buddhism and many religions, which is that kind of the source of suffering is desire. Seneca says he wants nothing as the richest man in the world. So Adora has applied this to her life to winning effect. She's going around life just very happy with whatever fate gives her, believing she has snuffed out desire within her. But when she meets Digby at the ballet, she realizes that maybe there is still an ember burning deep inside and she does perhaps want what she does not have.
SIMON: Do I need to fill in that blank?
SEMPLE: (Laughter) Love. Love in her life.
SIMON: Lot of philosophy in this book. Is this a particular interest of yours?
SEMPLE: Yes. I started studying Stoicism about 10 years ago, and I read the Stoics every morning. I go through the list of virtues, which are wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, and I realign my days so that I'm only concerned with the virtues, and I'm not concerned with what the Stoics would call externals. Epictetus, one of the original Roman Stoics, basically invented the serenity prayer.
SIMON: Yeah.
SEMPLE: The philosophy is figure out what you can control and only work on that, and the rest just cheerfully throw over to fate.
SIMON: Yeah. The story winds through a lot from the New York art world to Paris.
SEMPLE: Yes.
SIMON: Does Adora begin to feel that she has underestimated herself?
SEMPLE: Yes, and I think that that is one of the things that I was most interested in in writing this book and this character is because she's in her late 50s, which is how old I was when I wrote the book, and we're coming up on retirement age. And if we're single, all the men our age are, you know, chasing after women young enough to be our daughters, and society is just basically telling us we're done. We don't want to look at you. At the same time, I, at my age, feel better than I've ever felt before, like, at the top of my game. And all of my women I feel like are just kind of getting started, you know, at our age. And...
SIMON: You mean your own coven of friends, if you please?
SEMPLE: Yes, my coven of friends, I feel like we're optimistic about the future. We have a lot of energy. We know our values. We're very clear about things. We have a lot of free time now that the kids are away at college. And I think we really want to just, like, get the party started. 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. She thinks, OK, I'll just be here quietly and not take up a lot of space and feel big. But then when this very big plot happens that she steps into...
SIMON: Yeah.
SEMPLE: ...And she has to rise up to the challenges of it, plus, there's love, she realizes, wait, maybe I am not going to go gentle into that good night.
SIMON: What is a happy life? I don't ask this of every novelist, by the way, 'cause they often don't have them, but...
SEMPLE: I'd say a happy life is flourishing. And that's a term from Aristotle. And it's something that I really think about a lot where he said that the purpose of a human being was to flourish like the purpose of a fork is to pick up food. So when I think about flourishing, I think that that is about living up to your potential and being kind and not wasting a lot of energy worrying about the past or the future. And it's about identifying what you love to do and what you're best at and then feeling grateful about having the time to do it and then organizing your time around that in a smart way.
SIMON: Maria Semple's new novel, "Go Gentle." Thanks so much for being with us.
SEMPLE: Thank you for having me, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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