Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Bernadette, Bee’s mother and Elgin Branch’s wife, was formerly an esteemed architect renowned for inspired and elegant reuse of castoff materials, for which she received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Bernadette worked in Los Angeles after studying architecture at Princeton. Her reputation as an architect is based on the two homes she built for herself and Elgin in Los Angeles, a converted factory, Beeber Bifocal, and a house built entirely of locally salvaged materials, the Twenty Mile House.

After a personal disaster involving the destruction of her most celebrated and personal project, the Twenty Mile House, she abandoned her career and followed Elgin to Seattle. She suffered several miscarriages before giving birth to Bee, whose heart defect made her early years precarious. When the action of the novel begins, Bernadette has become socially isolated and let the former school she bought as a home fall into ruin. She avoids involvement with the “Galer Street Gnats” (57), as she calls the other mothers, dreads travel, feels overwhelmed by the simplest domestic responsibilities, and has become increasingly reliant on a “virtual assistant,” Manjula, supposedly based in Delhi. 

Bernadette’s attempts at withdrawal backfire. Her disengagement from events at Galer Street School leads to a confrontation with Audrey Griffin, her chief antagonist among the “gnats,” and her attempts to avoid the trip to Antarctica force a crisis in her marriage to Elgin. After a disastrous intervention in which Elgin attempts to force her to commit herself to a mental hospital, she finds herself traveling alone to Antarctica, where she unexpectedly rediscovers her vocation as an architect.

Elgin is Bernadette’s husband and an engineer at Microsoft. His TED Talk on his pet project, Samantha 2, a form of artificial intelligence capable of responding directly to a user’s thoughts, is the fourth most viewed TED Talk on YouTube. Devoted to his family, Elgin has nevertheless allowed himself to become so immersed in his work at Microsoft that he has lost touch with the daily lives of his wife and daughter. He is deeply concerned by Bernadette’s withdrawal and cannot forget how ill Bee once was, and his immersion in work seems in part to be a way of escaping his anxiety. When circumstances force him to confront his wife’s problems, Elgin overreacts in ways that end up splintering his family. Elgin’s fame within the closed world of Microsoft earn him the devotion of his admin, Soo-Lin, also a Galer Street gnat, as well as the deference of outsiders such as FBI Agent Strang and Dr. Kurtz.

Audrey is the mother of Kyle, one of Bee’s classmates at Galer Street, and a neighbor of the Branches. She is fiercely critical of Bernadette and acts as her chief antagonist in Seattle. Audrey takes a leading role in the community of Galer Street parents, hosting the Prospective Parent Brunch and demanding that Bernadette remove the blackberry brambles from Straight Gate, which adjoins the Griffins’ property, prior to the brunch. Deeply religious, Audrey initially shows a tendency to self-delusion and hypocrisy, ignoring her son’s problems and exaggerating the consequences of her conflict with Bernadette. She later experiences a change of heart and works to make amends for her earlier actions. Her husband, Warren Griffin, plays a minor role in the novel.

Recently divorced and the mother of two Galer Street students, Alexandra and Lincoln, Soo-Lin is a close friend of Audrey Griffin and an employee of Microsoft. Soo-Lin becomes entangled in Elgin’s personal life after being assigned to work as his administrative assistant. This leads to a breach in her friendship with Audrey and a brief fling with Elgin, which leaves Soo-Lin pregnant. Soo-Lin is also an enthusiastic participant in a self-help group called VAV (Victims Against Victimization) and interprets the events she describes using the group’s specialized jargon.

Jellinek is a professor of architecture at the University of Southern California, who knew Bernadette in Los Angeles and admired her work. Jellinek contributes to the Artforum article and Bernadette believes he has also organized the 20 x 20 x 20 competition inspired by the anniversary of the Twenty Mile House. After learning of the competition, Bernadette writes Jellinek a long letter detailing her life and discontents since moving to Seattle. He responds by telling her that she must either create or become “a menace to society” (147).