There are few writers whose work is more eagerly anticipated than that of the novelist Mona Simpson. Ever since her first book, Anywhere but Here, became a best-seller after being published in 1986, Simpson has explored the ways families connect and disconnect. Her latest, Commitment, centers on a single mother’s harrowing collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s. An earlier novel, A Regular Guy, is generally considered by critics to be partly inspired by the life and habits of her brother, Steve Jobs, whom she first met in 1986 after Steve learned that he had a sister. She eloquently eulogized him at his memorial service in 2011, but Simpson is far too talented a writer to ransack the truly personal for her books, so rich is her imagination and so private her life.
JIM KELLY: Your new novel is a heartbreaker, detailing the lives of a single mother who falls into a deep depression, and of her three children, who suddenly must cope on their own. It is such a deeply felt book that I wonder how much you relied on your own experiences to make the novel come alive.
