Mona Simpson ’85 Publishes New Novel, ‘Commitment’

Mona Simpson '85 returns with a new novel, Commitment, published by Knopf earlier this spring.

Commitment is a masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.

After Diane Aziz drives her oldest son from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley, she falls into a deep depression that alters her life and the lives of her three children. Moving from Berkeley and Los Angeles to New York and back again, this is a story about one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives. A resonant novel about family and duty and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, Commitment honors the spirit of fragile, imperfect mothers and the under-chronicled significance of friends in determining the lives of our children left on their own.

The novel carries a personal tie to Simpson’s own family history: “I grew up with a single mom who had issues,” Simpson said in an interview with the LA Times. “No diagnoses but delusions. I wanted to see if there could have been a better way for her. My life would have been worse, but maybe it would have been better for her.”

Commitment is as much the mother’s story as it is her children’s, with each character narrating part of this sweeping novel, which Simpson says took her about six years to write:

“I have a lot of ideas, but not all of those ideas have a door,” Simpson said. “You have to find the door. I think what I aspire to (and haven’t yet achieved) is to show people living their lives, deeply influenced by forces of history, though they don’t always understand that.”

Called a minimalist masterpiece by Ann Levin for The Washington Post, Commitment “makes the case in a quiet but insistent voice that our lives do matter, even if other people think they are broken."

Order your copy of Commitment here.

Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Mona Simpson 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, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook. 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 Reader’s Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mona lives in Santa Monica with her two children and Bartleby the dog.