Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - Author's view

I’m going to discuss what no self-respecting writer wants to be caught discussing, and that’s the theme of my novel. 
When I sat down to write Where’d You Go, Bernadette, my main concern was that it be hugely entertaining for the reader. My motto was, ‘If I have fun writing it, they’ll have fun reading it.’ I wanted the characters to be relatable but a little wild, the story to be grounded but veering off in surprising directions, the tone to be sharp but sweet. The whole endeavour was so brain-bruising, fiendishly complicated and time-gobbling that the last thing I thought about was what I wanted to say.
But a wonderful and mysterious thing happened when I read through the first draft Where’d You Go, Bernadette after having put it aside for a few weeks. My fresh eyes noticed key words and phrases that kept popping up. It dawned on me that over and over, I had framed my characters’ relationships with each other not in terms of love, but in terms of how well they knew each other.
For instance, Elgie contacts a psychiatrist (and unwittingly ignites a catastrophic chain of events) when he realizes he no longer ‘knows’ his wife, Bernadette. Their daughter Bee, outraged when a classmate’s mother assumes she has chosen to go away to boarding school to escape Bernadette, screams, ‘You don’t know me!’ Bee’s ultimate insult to Elgie is an accusation of ‘not knowing anything about’ her relationship with Bernadette. Soo-Lin forlornly concludes that a man isn’t romantically interested in her when she realises he never asks her any questions about herself. In one of my favourite lines in the book—one that I reluctantly cut after two editors, an agent, and a friend flagged it as unspeakably mean—Audrey informs Bernadette that several generations of her family lived in the same neighbourhood, and Bernadette dryly responds, ‘You seem to be mistaking me for someone who wants to get to know you.’ 
There are a dozen other instances. All were there in the first draft, and I can’t say I was conscious of any of them. But when I read the manuscript over, the conclusion was inescapable: I was trying to articulate something that deep down I obviously felt very strongly about, that to know someone is to love them.
And then, a memory:
When my daughter was days old, I confessed to my sister, a mother of three, that I felt like I didn’t love her. ‘That’s because you don’t know her yet,’ my sister said. But how do you get to know a squirming, peeping bundle that opens her eyes only to greedily, painfully nurse and then conk out for eight hours? My best guess was to lay my daughter down, lie beside her, and watch. By getting to know her in this way, I grew to love her.
I didn’t remember this either until I read through the first draft of Where’d You Go, Bernadette. But somehow, the idea that love comes from knowledge—and estrangement from a lack of knowledge—ended up all over my pages.
Indeed, the opening lines of Where’d You Go, Bernadette announce that what follows is the dossier Bee has compiled in an attempt to learn everything she can about her mother. So the form of the novel, the object the reader is holding in his hands, is an expression of this definition of love. 
I can’t imagine readers of Where’d You Go, Bernadette would pick up on any of this. Nor would I want them to!  But if anybody’s curious how the novel’s themes came about, it was by complete surprise, when I was having too much fun to notice.


Source: http://www.youreadinggroup.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/customPage.do?CMSFragment=PrizeWinnersSlot9.jsp&title=Book%20Of%20The%20Month