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
cultural love people
We have all these cultural assumptions about love. People get hurt, and we say, 'Oh, it's no one's fault.'
people
Gossip is essentially storytelling: storytelling about people whom we know.
food people
I do have food in my books. Different people eat different ways.
people parent drug
Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.
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.
across along driveway house human monica pages revival santa side spanish steal thousands wrote
In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.
left lived midwest small town twelve
I left the Midwest when I was twelve years old, and I haven't lived in a small town since.
believer life using works
I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.
children gave home kids large raising routines stayed together women
We go to college, live together or marry, and have kids - often with little more thought to the daily routines of raising children than our grandparents gave them, when women by and large stayed at home.
life love man met waiting
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.
good hearts love vulnerable
Even more than we want good love for ourselves, we want it for our children, those vulnerable satellites of our hearts that we send, unsteady, into the world.
relationship
I've never had an exclusive relationship to a room where I write. I used to want one.
deeply draw felt powerful prince
I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.
although came cared deal family foods great grew money original single stores
I grew up with a single mother, and although we didn't have a lot of money, she cared a great deal about what we ate. We were the original health-food family. We shopped at what were called health-food stores before Whole Foods - everything came from bins.