Mona Simpson will be reading live on Thacker Mountain Radio broadcast from Off Square Books.
Hollywood. Sunshine, palm trees, cool cars, movie stars. About Hollywood many movies have been made, and books written. The Hollywood of My Hollywood is a different kind of place, as it belongs to the two narrators of Mona Simpson's fifth novel, Claire and Lola. Claire is a concert cellist and composer whose transition into motherhood pushes her professional life aside, as her husband puts in long hours every day in his not terribly secure job as a television writer. Lola is Claire's Filipina nanny, sending her money each week back home to her own five children. The story develops in alternating chapters told in the voices of Claire and Lola. Revealed from two very different perspectives, their Hollywood is the realistic, close-to-the-heart domestic life that takes place a world apart from tinsel town. Lola becomes a marvelous, unforgettable character in this novel that Joseph O'Neill called "a darkly beautiful atlas of the American promised land, and a definitive novel of modern domesticity." RH