Mona Simpson (Mona Elizabeth Simpson) Biography

American writer, born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, educated at Berkeley and Columbia Universities. She has published stories in Harper's, the Paris Review, and literary journals like the Iowa Review and Ploughshares; one story, ‘Approximations’, was included in the anthology Twenty under Thirty (1985). She received wide acclaim for her first novel, Anywhere but Here (1986), which concerned an eccentric mother–daughter relationship. Adele August and her daughter Ann travel from the Midwest to Beverly Hills so that Ann can become a child star. Once in Beverly Hills, life pales and illusions set in as the dream sours, and the novel charts the way the relationship grows apart as Ann desires more independence from her mother. Simpson's second novel, The Lost Father (1991), describes Ann's adult life. Now known as Mayan Stevenson, she is finally on her own, leading a normal life and attending medical school. However, her lifelong obsession with the father she never knew grows, and the novel follows her literal and metaphorical search for him.