Mona Simpson
Mona Simpson
Mona Elizabeth Simpson is an American novelist. She has written six novels and is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angelesand the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth14 June 1957
CityGreen Bay, WI
CountryUnited States of America
forever world chunks
We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.
forever matter ever-after
So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after
thinking way different
Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good a different way. But tricks, they do not always work.
people parent drug
Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.
book reading vacation
Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.
brother father men
Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.
morning writing night
I unplug the phone and close the door and just stick with it. I don't ever go out for lunch and I don't take vacations. I like to be awake when no one else is: either just before dawn in the morning or late, late at night. Silence helps.
grandmother faces mouths
In every person's face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth.
father america grew
Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.
men fatherhood generations
The transparency men have enjoyed for generations, about their ability to frankly work while also reveling in fatherhood, is still complicated for women. Which is not to say that anyone can have everything.
mother parent speech
My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again.
thinking people identity
Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.
mother men ice
The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.
mother horse kings
Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.