2026-04-05
33 分钟Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today has spent her career observing how people live, first through comedy and then through fiction.
Her new novel turns on an ancient idea, stoicism,
the belief that while we can not control what happens to us, we can control how we respond.
It's about.
Restraint, perspective and letting go of what doesn't matter.
And I'm sure she'll tell us much more about that as our conversation goes on.
And having read the book, I am now a convert and want to call myself a stoic.
She was born in California, the daughter of the screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr.
And grew up between the United States and Spain before returning to study English at Barnard College in New York.
From there, she moved into television, building a career in Hollywood across the 1990s and 2000s,
writing for Beverly Hills 90210, Ellen, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live and Arrested Development, amongst others.
It's a world where pace is everything and every line has to land.
Well, she later turned to fiction.
This One Is Mine, Where Do You Go Bernadette and Today Will Be Different,
have been translated into more than 40 languages and have built her a global readership.
Her new novel, Go Gentle, brings those strands together.
It 's sharp, funny and full of ideas but grounded in the daily life of a woman in New York trying to work out how to live
well as a mother, as a friend and as someone confronting the realities of ageing.