My Hollywood [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Mona Simpson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 3, 2010

A wonderfully provocative and appealing novel, from the much-loved author of Anywhere But Here and A Regular Guy, her first in ten years. It tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.

Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage—once a genuine 50/50 arrangement—changes, with Paul working long hours and Claire left at home with a baby, William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for.

Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who is working in America to pay for her own children’s higher education back in the Philippines, becomes their nanny. Lola stabilizes the rocky household and soon other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and “Williamo” remains her own closely guarded secret.

In a novel at turns satirical and heartbreaking, where mothers’ modern ideas are given practical overhauls by nannies, we meet Lola’s vast network of fellow caregivers, each with her own story to tell. We see the upstairs competition for the best nanny and the downstairs competition for the best deal, and are forced to ask whether it is possible to buy love for our children and what that transaction costs us all.

We look into two contemporary marriages—one in America and one in the Philippines—and witness their endangerment, despite the best of intentions.

My Hollywood is a tender, witty, and resonant novel that provides the profound pleasures readers have come to expect from Mona Simpson, here writing at the height of her powers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Kathryn Stockett Reviews My Hollywood

Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she moved to New York City, where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. The Help is her first novel. Read her review of My Hollywood:

My Hollywood: Step into the glittering lives of Hollywood America, as scrubbed, wiped, and polished by immigrant women. It's so refreshing that a book can be this poignant, satirical, and heartbreaking at once. You might find yourself laughing at your own life as you read what the help says and thinks behind the backs of American housewives. You'll wonder at the intricate system of the modern household--where one mother pays another to give her children love. It illuminates the differences between American and immigrant mothers--until you realize how alike we are! The vivid accents and the vibrant voices of the children continue to ring in my ear. I loaned it to my mom and she took it to Mississippi with her and won't send it back. I'll be buying a copy of my own.

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From Bookmarks Magazine

With the publication of novels like Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's The Nanny Diaries (2002) and Kathryn Stockett's The Help (**** Selection Jan/Feb 2010), there is no shortage of books about women and their domestic employees. Even so, Simpson's pragmatic and delightfully observant nanny Lola shines in this story of contemporary child rearing. Critics did find Claire, with her privileged lifestyle and chronic self-doubt, a slightly less compelling character. And, in stark contrast to all other critics, the Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer found the novel disorganized, repetitive, and filled with exasperating characters. While a few readers may not find My Hollywood to their liking, most should find it an entertaining and heartfelt addition to Simpson's body of work.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (August 3, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307273520
• ISBN-13: 978-0307273529
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.3 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #453,279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mona Simpson was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, then moved to Los Angeles as 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, a 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 too much to me," she says.

Mona lives in Santa Monica with her two children and Bartelby the dog.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 52 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant August 5, 2010

By A reader

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a beautiful and expansive novel about love (maternal and marital) and work (paid and unpaid). Claire, a composer, is a new mother trying to figure out how to manage the all consuming work of tending a baby and still do what sustains her--playing the cello and writing music. (Her husband Paul, an anxious TV writer-in-training, goes to work in the morning and stays there until deep in the night.) So Claire hires Lola, a Filipina nanny who is raising the money to send her youngest daughter through medical school. The two women take turns telling their stories in sharply contrasting, but equally compelling voices. Throughout, Simpson addresses vital human concerns: Who actually raises the children? Can a mostly-absent parent still be a good parent? How do children thrive and marriages endure in these various arrangements? Simpson's prose has notes of Henry Green and Virginia Woolf and even, at times, the satiric edge of Evelyn Waugh. This book is intelligent, beautifully and quite cleverly written, often funny. A literary novel for the ages.

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina) November 1, 2010

By Dorothea Brooks

Format:Hardcover

Mona Simpson is one of the only contemporary novelists to nail the working mother species and to give a voice to the voiceless Filipina, the indispensable yet invisible Nanny. My Hollywood should be required reading for mothers, fathers, and anybody interested in the triangular relationships between children, their caretakers, and their harrowed and harassed parents. My Hollywood manages, ever so lightly, no heavy-handedness there, to give voice to the working mother's struggle--always wanting two things at once--and to the voiceless caregivers (in this case the beautifully-drawn Lola). Simpson's has mastered double narration. On one hand, we read about Claire the musician, the new mother, the woman seeking a room of her own with a crib in the corner. On the other, Lola, the Filipina nanny, sending her pennies back home, building an autonomous life for the children she has left behind and never sees. How many women like Claire do we know, still shaking off the residue of romance, self-destructive perfectionists, who make a profession out of being so hard on themselves? This novel is a must read for practitioners and theorists of the American work ethic, and how it coalesces with the myth of the perfect mother. Work is everywhere in Simpson's characters' lives--of course in husband-Paul's infernal Hollywood schedule, but also in Claire's consciousness that each minute that passes with "nothing" to show for is pure loss: (I'd blown half my time... I was a dandelion blown). What a brilliant portrait of modern time (Time had once been public, in a clock tower on a town square; everyone saw the same hour and minutes. When watches were invented...people could carry around their own time).

I'm sure that some day anthropologists will use Simpson's novel to talk about the strange historical moment when the female body is violently desexualized for the sake of the child. Her breast pumps are the symbols of a new female frontier; pumping milk, rather than oil, becomes a frantic devotional ritual. And this same pumping, when viewed from Lola's (the gloriously portrayed nanny, speaking in her own voice) point of view, reveals the tragic and preposterous aspect of sacrifice. To Lola, the near-ascetic quality of that "natural" act of breastfeeding becomes unnatural, painful, and excruciatingly lonely. Caring little for the health benefits of mother's milk, Lola observes with disbelief that formula "it is like poison to them," Simpson's formula-phobic Americans.

Virginia Woolf would have loved this novel. Claire craves a room of her own, admits that she would have so much preferred being the father than the mother. Reading My Hollywood, I kept marveling at the enormous service Simpson does by ventriloquizing the thousand voiceless house help, many working without a fixed schedule, without health care, invisible elves giving love to the children of ease, fame, and neurosis.

Another remarkable component of the book is the disposable quality of these nannies. The Lolas of the world, at one time so essential to the lonely mothers, so nurturing toward Hollywood's semi-orphaned children, suddenly become pariahs when they cannot provide the children with what Bourdieu calls academic or social distinction. Obstacles to the kid's linguistic/social advancement, these women are eventually given the sack (or the chop as Simpson puts it). The twist here is that as soon as a nanny is dismissed, it is the mother who must wave goodbye to her world, to her freedom. It is she who sacrifices the only warmth of the household for the child's future success. All kinds of divorces loom in My Hollywood, but Simpson's triumph is to present us with an entirely new kind of sentimental bereavement. Not just the disintegration of couples, the drying up of sexual passion, but the divorce between employers and employees, mothers of blood and mothers of sweat.

I hope everybody reads about Simpson's Lola and how that it is her time that give us, modern working mothers, our careers, identities, and dignity. Simpson could have made us cry, but instead she chills us. Watch for the treatment of depression in the novel. How rare it is that Prozac is prescribed to the Filipina and not the Emma Bovary doppelganger. Why does it seem so odd, as though the rich and educated have a metaphysical monopoly on anti-depressants, to witness Lola's slow descent into melancholy?

What an amazing commentary on what career means to "us" and to "them." Simpson reveals brilliantly how by the end of the novel, Lola has been contaminated by powerful American symbiosis of identity and career. Early on, Claire asks Lola what she had wanted to be. Lola is mystified. And then (what a great touch), when she goes back home to the Philippines, she is stunned that "[n]o one asks my job." She suddenly realizes that the currency of power and recognition is fundamentally different in her two distinct homes. The invisible sacrifices she has made to enable her kids' economic freedom (My children they'll never have to go anywhere. They can stay home. That is what I did for my life...) are just that--invisible.
Simpson's novel rips brilliantly into "our" working generation's undoubtedly unromantic, but prevalent adultery--not men stealing other men's wives or wives stealing husbands-- but babysitters and nannies being coveted and seduced by other parents. No longer after bimbos or Prince Charming, parents are ogling the nanny as ultimate commodity. The Lolas of Simpson's world are the great triangulated investments, the perfect and covetable reflections of success.

Also watch out for Simpson's satirical genius: UCLA babysitters refusing to wash dishes. Claire lying about money and hiding her receipts from Barney's. You will howl at the terrible Gelfond family, their twins, and the fabulous Nanny-contract (only matched in literature by Balzac's Marriage Contract). And the fantastically moving ode to ironing. Five stars!

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Fell a little bit flat August 14, 2010

By E. Jacobs TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a book about the modern Mom in all her over-scheduled yet scattered glory. There were definite insights in this book, and areas where the writing was outstanding. But, unfortunately, the story ultimately fell a bit flat.

Told alternately from the perspective of Claire, a composer and the mother of a young son; and Lola, the Filipina nanny whom she hires to watch her child when she is working, the story covers a lot of the challenges that the working mother faces, including the guilt involved in choosing to continue with a career when having a young child. I am not sure if the author was trying to portray the hectic and often scattered nature of the working mother when using Claire as the narrator, but I found her sections a bit serpentine and unfocused. From Lola's narrative, we also get insights into a close community of nannies who bond together and share their own challenges, which in many cases includes being working mothers themselves.

Nobody's perfect in this book. Mistakes are made on both sides of the spectrum. I think the author actually nailed a lot of the challenges to parenting these days, but overall, the story gets flat and repetitive as the book goes on. Perhaps this is because the everyday trials and tribulations of the average mom tend to be a bit boring after awhile in real life as well as on the page. Everyone's just doing what they think is best for their family, but there is really not much excitement there. The book was just okay.