Short stories by Mona Simpson
Mona Simpson was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, then moved to Los Angeles a young teenager. Her father was a recent immigrant from Syria and her mother was the daughter of a mink farmer and the first person in her family to attend college. Simpson went to Berkeley, where she studied poetry. She worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia’s MFA program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road.
Her work has been awarded several prizes: a Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She worked ten years on My Hollywood. “It’s the book that took me too long because it meant so much to me,” she says.
Mona lives in Santa Monica with her two children and Bartleby the dog.
Listing 3 stories.
A Filipina nanny working for a white family in the United States saves coins with the child to take him to visit her home in the Philippines. When the bank rejects their painstakingly-collected pennies, she teaches him a lesson about anger and optimism.
When the father of a college-aged girl, who works in a mail center and has taken to stealing her classmates' mail, comes to visit, he sexually assaults his daughter, as he has been doing since she was a young girl.
When a Southern California psychologist learns that her seemingly normal middle-aged client is a pedophile, she sets him on a morally dubious course of treatment.