Maria Semple spent her first few years traveling around Europe with her parents. While living in Spain, her father, Lorenzo wrote the pilot for the TV series Batman. The family packed up and moved to Los Angeles. After Lorenzo became established as a screenwriter, the family moved to Aspen, Colorado. For high school, Maria was sent away to boarding school at Choate Rosemary Hall and loved every minute of it.
College was at Barnard, where Maria had big plans of becoming a novelist or a teacher. Those dreams got derailed when she sold a movie script to Twentieth Century Fox just after graduation and moved to LA. The movie didn't get made, but she was able to make a living writing more screenplays that didn't get made. Maria got into TV when her friend Darren Star-- who she'd met on the ski slopes in Aspen years earlier-- gave her a job on Beverly Hills 90210. Thus began a fifteen-year career in television, writing for a bunch of shows like Ellen, Mad About You and Arrested Development.
Maria had a baby, quit television and finally gave novel-writing a try. THIS ONE IS MINE was the result. It was published by Little, Brown in December 2008. Maria, her boyfriend and daughter left LA for Seattle, where her new novel, WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE begins. WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE will be published by Little, Brown in July 2012.