Award-winning writer Mona Simpson—author of Commitment, Anywhere But Here, and My Hollywood—discusses the dramatic and sometimes tumultuous process of beginning a novel. Fresh off turning in her latest project, Help and Its Sequel, Simpson has arrived in Berlin with no fewer than three potential new novel ideas. One explores a biracial and cross-class relationship, another is a contemporary love story in which two middle-aged women contrive to write a romance novel to escape their jobs, and the third book is based on two historical women prominent in the life of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Simpson will talk about how a novelist selects from the many bits of inspiration that present themselves and how sometimes the material itself makes the decision, overriding the writer’s best intentions.
Meet the speaker
Mona Simpson is a writer based in Santa Monica, California. She holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from Columbia University. Simpson is the author of seven novels: Anywhere but Here (Knopf, 1986), The Lost Father (Knopf, 1993), A Regular Guy (Knopf, 1997), Off Keck Road (Knopf, 2000), My Hollywood…
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