Delightful novel 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette?' might soon be a delightful Linklater film

Richard Linklater’s next movie might move at a slightly more normal pace than his last one. The Hollywood Reporter says that the Boyhood director is in talks to direct Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Maria Semple’s best-selling 2012 novel about an agoraphobic mom who goes missing right before her family takes a trip to Antarctica. The book is told in a series of emails, letters and police documents, so a director with a more creative approach to storytelling might be just what this film needs.

What’s strange is that this is mostly a story (written by a woman) about the relationship between a woman and her daughter, which you think would be a perfect movie for a woman to direct. Not that women can only direct movies about each other, but you would think someone would at least consider it in an industry that’s sorely lacking women in prominent roles behind-the-scenes.

The film doesn’t have a release date or cast yet, but THR says that the novel has been adapted to a screenplay by Fault in Our Stars writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. If I point out that both of the screenwriters are men will I start to sound like a broken record?

Danielle Henderson is a lapsed academic, heavy metal karaoke machine, and culture editor at Fusion. She enjoys thinking about how race, gender, and sexuality shape our cultural narratives, but not in a boring way.