After playing an evil stepmother, a bisexual housewife and a fierce TV producer this year, Cate Blanchett is looking to continue her streak of taking up some of the best female roles Hollywood has to offer by portraying an agoraphobic architect in the film adaptation of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?”

Blanchett is in talks to star as Bernadette, the brilliant recluse and eccentric mother who disappears before a family trip to Antarctica in Maria Semple’s best-seller. The story is told from the POV of Bernadette’s 15-year-old daughter, who searches for her beloved mom while uncovering her storied past and buried ambitions.

Unfortunately, the filmic translation of the feminist novel boasts neither a woman writer nor director. The project will, however, be overseen by producers Megan Ellison and Nina Jacobson.

Here’s the book synopsis:

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect; and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle — and people in general — has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence — creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.

[via THR]