Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is an epistolary comedy novel by the American writer Maria Semple, published in 2012. It is narrated by fifteen-year-old Bee Branch and is told largely through documents.

Bee Branch lives in Seattle with her parents: her mother Bernadette Fox, an architect who designed a celebrated building and has since become agoraphobic and stays at home, and her father Elgin, a computer genius who works at Microsoft. Having been promised a reward of her own choosing in return for good grades, Bee presents her parents with a perfect report card and asks for a family holiday to Antarctica. Bernadette delegates the arrangements to a personal assistant in India called Manjula, and she is meanwhile in the middle of a running feud with some of the other mothers at Bee's private school, the main instigator of which is one of the school's most prominent parents. Then Bernadette disappears, and the novel is assembled from the emails, memos, transcripts and other documents that Bee gathers in order to work out what happened to her mother.

Semple writes comedy, and the book's form of letters and messages lets its characters give themselves away in the way they write rather than in what they say.