Events

 Mona Simpson, acclaimed author of Anywhere But Here and A Regular Guy, has written a wonderfully provocative and appealing new novel, her first in ten years. My Hollywood tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.   Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage, once a 50/50 arrangement, changes, with Claire left at home with a baby, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for.   Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who is working in America to pay for her own children’s higher education back in the Philippines, becomes their nanny. Lola stabilizes the rocky household and soon other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and “Williamo” remains her own closely guarded secret.   In a novel at turns satirical and heartbreaking, we see two versions of events: the upstairs competition for the best nanny and the downstairs competition for the best deal, and are forced to ask whether it is possible to buy love for our children and what that transaction costs us all.   “This big gorgeous book is at once an entertaining, socially astute upstairs-downstairs drama and a profound meditation on the shifting and often competing demands of love and work in a woman’s life. One more time, Mona Simpson has burrowed deep into the American family to extract the shivering truth about the many trade-offs women face in raising children today. Lola, the Filipina nanny at the heart of this book, is surely one of the great literary creations of our time. My Hollywood is vast in scope, exquisite in detail, rife with pleasure.” – Michelle Huneven   “In her first novel since Off Keck Road, Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents… The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson’s taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, often times with a single biting sentence. Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson’s latest is well worth the wait.”  -- Publishers Weekly, starred review   “A darkly beautiful atlas of the American promised land, and a definitive novel of modern domesticity.  Brilliant, in short.”  -- Joseph O’Neill    “Simpson's massive gifts -- for unflinching precision, for artful indirection and for the deft unfurling of imagery -- are on vivid display in My Hollywood, a book that carries us down deep, into the darkness of two distinct worlds, and lights them up, finding all the comedy in the ways they are the same world, and all the tragedy in the unbridgeable distance between them.”  -- Michael Chabon   Mona Simpson is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, and Off Keck Road, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize of the Chicago Tribune.American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santa Monica.