Announcer: Listener support at WNYC Studios.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Later this hour, you're going to hear two special performances from singer-songwriter Hamilton Leithauser, who is also in the midst of a reunion tour with his band, The Walkman. We'll get to that in just a little bit, but let's get the hour started with Mona Simpson.

[music]

Alison Stewart: The latest novel from Mona Simpson begins with a crisis. Diane Aziz is a single mom of three kids, a nurse who struggles to pay the bills and keep the household running in 1970s California. Her eldest son, Walter, gets into UC Berkeley and the whole family drives up to drop him off. When they return, Diane gets into bed and doesn't leave. Eventually, she is admitted to a state hospital for depression. Her kids are left to pick up the pieces. Walter, the eldest, grapples with whether he should return home from college and hustles to figure out how to pay tuition. Lina, the middle child and only daughter, ends up moving to the East Coast and pursuing a career in art. Donnie, the youngest child, ends caught up in a spiral of addiction.

Walter, Lina, and Donnie aren't totally alone. A friend of their mothers, Julie, goes above and beyond to house and care for the kids. Teachers, colleagues, and doctors come into these kids lives and offer much needed help. The novel is tied to commitment, and it was our April Get Lit with All of It book club selection. I began my conversation with Mona Simpson by asking her if this was the book she set out to write.

Mona Simpson: Yes, in the end it was. I didn't always know that, but by the end, this was the story I set out to write. It started in a lot of different ways. I started in a very simple way, to write about a college student who had the normal experiences of college but had something else much more serious in the back of his mind. As I teach college and there's a leveling effect of college, everybody's in a dorm, everyone eats in the same cafeteria. It feels like there's a kind of equality, but of course there's not. People have other things going on. It ended up being a story about a mother who becomes severely depressed and enters a mental health hospital.

Alison Stewart: Why did you start the story in the 1970s?

Mona Simpson: That was the moment I ended up, of course, as one does, when one gets interested in something deeply. I ended up doing a lot of research and learning a lot about the history of the treatment of mental health, even especially in America and especially with these big hospitals we used to have. The 1970s, '80s was about when things really began to change. In 1963, Kennedy signed the Mental Health Act, which was the last piece of legislation he did before he was assassinated. That began the trend to empty out all these big institutional hospitals.

Alison Stewart: What creative opportunities did it provide for you to set it in the '70s?

Mona Simpson: I felt it was, in a way, the last moment one could have an experience there. I think that what I tended to believe, I was a normal person who went and saw one food with a cuckoo's nest, and I tended to believe that these were all terrible institutions and that it was a good thing that they were closed, but actually not. Oliver Sachs wrote a piece I read which quoted a lot of patients who'd actually had safety and security in these places that no longer, for the most part, exist anymore.

Alison Stewart: When you think about the college kids you teach now and college kids in the '70s, how did you have to adjust your thinking?

Mona Simpson: For one thing, they were at the tail end of the Vietnam War, so the young men were worried about getting drafted. I had to adjust my thinking in a lot of ways. That's the fun part. It's going back and listening to the music and seeing the fashions and all that.

Alison Stewart: What were you listening to?

Mona Simpson: Oh, I was listening to a lot of things. A lot of things we listen to now still, like The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, but then some things we don't necessarily listen to anymore, so it was fun. There's a long playlist.

Alison Stewart: Are you someone who listens to music when you write, before you write, after you write?

Mona Simpson: Around when I write, not during. I like to hear the words.

Alison Stewart: It's not really a spoiler to say that Diane, the mother in the story, she does not get well in the book. She doesn't really improve. Was that always going to be the case?

Mona Simpson: I wasn't sure. I don't think of her as-- it's true that she never leaves the institution once she's there, but I don't think of her as having had a terrible life there. She finds a niche there that she feels useful. She's involved in the garden. She makes these strange floral arrangements. I wasn't sure what would happen to her, but that's what emerged. Usually by the time I finish a book, there's fewer and fewer choices, and the end becomes inevitable.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting. As you go, it's a wide-open world on page one. Then as you go along--

Mona Simpson: The choices you make guide you at a certain point.

Alison Stewart: Are they the choices you make or are they choices your characters make?

Mona Simpson: I feel like they're the choices your unconscious makes, maybe, through your characters and through your situation.

Alison Stewart: Because her illness is her whole life, even though she does not live it, where she's had a terrible life, it is something her family has to deal with. It's chronic. What did you want to explore about the impact of chronic illness and on some level, chronic crisis? What it does to a family?

Mona Simpson: One thing I wanted to explore in this particular novel or that came up I hadn't actually intended this, but one thing that ended up being very important for these characters and I think is an important and unsung matter in fiction is we have so many love stories and everything depends on whom one marries. You think in the English novel. The fact is, friendship is often one of the most unsung relationships in literature, and it's one of the most important, or at least it was for these kids in this time. Their mother had a very close friend. It was a friendship that was perhaps an uneven friendship. The friend admired their mother and stepped in and really did help her friend's kids.

Alison Stewart: Julie, she goes above and beyond in many ways.

Mona Simpson: Yes. It ends up being satisfying for her, too. She ends up having these unexpected relationships with children, which she doesn't have her own children. It ends up being, as so many of us have, a made family, not necessarily a born family.

Alison Stewart: Chosen family.

Mona Simpson: Yes.

Alison Stewart: This book is about I think I concentrated so much on the family, but you're saying it's about families and friends.

Mona Simpson: Yes, I think so. It was for me, that was a surprise. I hadn't intended her to be as big a character as she ended up becoming.

Alison Stewart: She's such a lovely character. She's a lovely person.

Mona Simpson: Yes, I think so too.

Alison Stewart: The children's father is fairly absent from their daily lives. At one point, Lina, the daughter, turns to him, hoping that he'll give her some money, gives her a couple hundred dollars, and we pretty much the kids don't interact with him at all. As your reader, we get a sense of him even though he's in the book sparingly. How did you decide how much or how little to let us have access to him?

Mona Simpson: As with many characters, often I think writers know a lot more about the characters than go into the book. I write a lot more scenes, and I actually wrote a whole scene with him, with the daughter going to him, and there was a whole elaborate scene with him that I ended up cutting because I thought we really didn't need it.

Alison Stewart: Why did you think you needed it before you cut it?

Mona Simpson: I just wanted to know why he was as careless, I guess, as he was or why he really was checked out. He wasn't really a big part of their life at that point, so the fact that their mother was having these troubles didn't move him the way that they hoped and maybe even expected it would.

Alison Stewart: Does that help you as an author, to just go ahead, write this whole scene, and then, okay, this helps me get to the next place or is it very hard to decide to make [unintelligible 00:09:23] to leave it on the [crosstalk]--

Mona Simpson: I don't necessarily recommend it. I don't think it's the most efficient way to work. I like knowing a lot about my characters. Whether I could do it more efficiently is yet to be determined. Next book we'll know that.

Alison Stewart: How does his absence affect his children?

Mona Simpson: It affects them a lot. I think the oldest son feels certain pressures that he might not to be the support and the man of the family in a way that people used to think of such a thing. Of course, financially they're much more dependent on their mom's somewhat meager salary, she's a nurse, so probably all kinds of ways.

Alison Stewart: Diane goes off the emotional cliff after dropping Walter at Berkeley. What is it about him leaving that leads to her unraveling?

Mona Simpson: I didn't necessarily think-- I thought that she was keeping it together until then, she would've liked to do it until all three of them were off, but she couldn't quite--

Alison Stewart: Was it something particular about Walter or was it--?

Mona Simpson: She just a--

[crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Change of the alchemy in the house? Is it--?

Mona: I think he was her first child and the way a lot of people do with their oldest child he was her closest child, I suppose.

Alison Stewart: The siblings all react in such different ways, and sets them off on different paths. As you think about your characters and you know them well, did their mother's illness change their trajectory or did it reveal their true characters? Would they always maybe have taken these paths?

Mona Simpson: Absolutely both. I think it did change the-- It's almost impossible to imagine how we would be if a major event in our life like a parent's death or illness or disappearance didn't occur, but I think they do react in very different ways. It's not only their characters, but it's also the age they are and the level of stability they have when it happens. They each come to terms with their mother's fall, with their mother's losses at a different point in their life. It's a story that's told from three different characters perspectives, but it's not the same events because Walter accepts the gravity of the situation sooner than the other two do, and they each have their moment where they come to terms with what's going to happen.

Alison Stewart: Walter, he keeps saying, "Should I come home?" Everybody's like, "No, stay at college. You stay at college." Despite feeling like he should, he does stay. Why do you think he never fully makes that leap, "I'm coming back home. I'm going to be like--

Mona Simpson: He feels he's not quite wanted back home. They keep telling him, "She would want you to stay in college." They're not sure how long she'll be in the hospital. Everyone at the beginning is hoping it'll be a short term, that there'll be a fix of some sort. Throughout the history of psychiatry, there are all these fixes as the drugs, there's all these potential things that could have worked more radically than they did in her case.

I think he didn't quite know what he would do if he went home. I think they didn't quite know what they would do with him if he came home. He had this vision that he could find a job, but he's drums up some jobs at college anyway, and is making some money and can send a little home, but he just doesn't quite know. I think in retrospect, he wishes he had,

Alison Stewart: I appreciate his entrepreneurial spirit, he has ideas. He's a creative person.

Mona Simpson: He starts out selling bicycles.

Alison Stewart: Also, he's got a little bit of hustle in him too.

Mona Simpson: Yes, definitely. He's one of those kids who always made money. Even as a kid at home, he took the garbage cans in for the neighbors and raked the leaves and all that stuff.

Alison Stewart: You attended UC Berkeley-

Mona Simpson: I did.

Alison Stewart: -in the '70s. What's something that you wanted to capture about student life at that time, and what did you infuse of that experience of yours into Walters?

Mona Simpson: What I really loved about UC Berkeley, what I still do love about the California university system, it's just the best deal going. It's a truly public university. I teach at UCLA now, almost all the students could be top students at private colleges by dent of their scores or their grades, but for the most part, they're poor and a lot of them live at home. A lot of the problems that are occurring at some of the more elite universities, the private schools aren't occurring at UC.

Most undergraduates, I should say, we had a huge strike among the graduate students, which was necessary and was good, but the undergraduates are very, very glad to be there. There's a whole lot of first-generation students. It's kind of a moving thing.

Alison Stewart: Well, that's also a subtext, not subtext as part of the book story and part of the themes, the idea how precarious one's financial health can be. How it's so easy for someone who does all the right things to fall through the cracks?

Mona Simpson: No, it's really true. It's funny, somebody, a friend of mine read this book and said to me, "Gosh, your character, education means a lot to you." I realized how far socioeconomically I'd come in my life because when I was growing up, I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which is a paper mill town and a canning factory town. Almost everyone knew that that was the way up and out, but yet, when the moment came, a lot of people couldn't make the leap, even if they were qualified, even if they knew that that was the thing to do because there was a seduction of a job. There was a seduction of being able to make money in the present tense, future be damned,

Alison Stewart: Also the need for it. In some cases, not really an option.

Mona Simpson: Right. In some cases, not an option, but interestingly, in some cases where there might've been an option, it was just such a strange ability that one found at 18 to make some salary.

Alison Stewart: Each of the kids has various coping mechanisms even into young adulthood, some of them not the healthiest. Donnie turns to drugs, and Walter has fantasies about his mother having a relationship with her doctor. What would you say is one of Lina's coping mechanisms?

Mona Simpson: Well, Lina does that thing I was just talking about. She does something presumptuous. She wants to go to a fancy college. She's in with a crowd of girls who are all going to go back east, which is a big thing in California schools, kids want to go back east. She wanted to go back east. She thinks she'll somehow get railroaded into staying in California. She just applies to her two or three top schools and that's it. She just sends those applications in, doesn't do any fallbacks, and in fact, she does not get in.

She gets waitlisted at one of them so she starts working. She had a job already at an ice cream store. She finds a job at a department store. This was the time of department store still. I know we miss them. She ends up falling under the wing of the woman who does the windows. She has a little bit of a design sense, and she ends up bringing in nests and botanical things for the windows. She's appreciated there. She likes it. She almost falls into the rhythm of that, but then she has a high school teacher who's very intent on getting her back to college, and eventually she does get in off the waitlist after some months.

Alison Stewart: Do you follow up, that teacher's name is Mrs. Anjani. That's such an unusual name. Where is it from? Where did you pick Ms. Anjani?

Mona Simpson: It's a Persian name. There are a lot of Persian teachers in LA.

Alison Stewart: How do you pick your characters names?

Mona Simpson: Well, I don't know. That's a good question. I'm half Syrian, and I think there's a whole lot of us in the United States who just fall through the quacks, and the only tinge left of our exotic ethnicities is in names.

Alison Stewart: The other thing about Lina, which repeats often in the book is, "I'm not beautiful anymore. I'm not as pretty as I was anymore."

Mona Simpson: I know it's funny. I just sit in Los Angeles. I just had a luncheon. The LA Library has a luncheon, and one woman was very upset. She said, "You made her lose her beauty. Why was that?" I tried to explain that actually she goes through phases. She's sometimes recognized as quite beautiful, other times less so, then she gets beautiful again. It's like that. It's my personal belief that that's kind of the way it is. That when you know people some days they look great and other days not as much. You think about other things with them.

Once when I was in my 20s and making a living doing some articles for magazines, I proposed-- This was when you could get good money from the women's magazines. I proposed an article in which I studied for [unintelligible 00:19:23] and looked at-- I posited that the difference between great literature or one of the differences was that people's appearances changed in the serious books. Whereas in the romantic novel, the dark, handsome stranger was always the dark, handsome stranger.

Alison Stewart: Does she consider her looks currency?

Mona Simpson: Yes, for sure. Sadly, show me the young woman in America who does not.

Alison Stewart: Still?

Mona Simpson: Even still.

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. We'll have more of my conversation with Mona Simpson from the New York Public Library, plus some questions from our live audience after a quick break. Stay with us.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author Mona Simpson about her new novel Commitment. It was our April Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 1,781 people were able to check out an e-copy and read along with us. You'll hear a couple of questions from our thoughtful live audience in just a bit, but first, here's more of my chat with Mona Simpson.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Walter becomes a bit obsessed with architecture, specifically the history of institutional architecture, how they were built, and how they were designed. What was something you learned about the design of these buildings, of these institutions? [crosstalk]

Mona Simpson: I learned a lot about them actually. There was an idea in Europe about the end of the 19th century, which was this idea of a moral cure instead of-- because in the Middle Ages, of course, people who suffered from mental health were pretty much tortured. Not intentionally, but the belief was that they were like animals. Not that animals are like this, I don't even think, but the thinking was that they could be left outdoors. They weren't sensitive the way that the rest of us are.

This was a new idea in France and among a Quaker colony in England to do a moral treatment which consisted of conversation, it consisted of some work in gardens and farm work, manual things around the retreat itself, and just rest, peace, good food, clean air, walks, conversation, games. That was meant to be curative.

This was taken up by the earliest psychiatrists in the United States. There was one in particular named Thomas Kirkbride, who was the superintendent of the Philadelphia Hospital for the insane. He happened to just be gifted architecturally. He wasn't trained, he was trained as a doctor. He drew up these elaborate plans of how everything in an institution could be ideally to help patients both have a decent life there while they lived there and also to recover.

It was a wing-like structure and the doctors and the nurses would themselves live in the central part of it and the louder patients would be at the very ends so as not to disturb others. [laughs] It was all thought out very carefully. It was quite lovely at the beginning. There were hospital libraries, there were orchestras, there were working farms, so they grew all their own vegetables and fruit and, of course, things got overcrowded very quickly.

Alison Stewart: We don't get much into Donnie's story until a good way into the book. What went into that decision? We really spent a lot of time with Walter, Lina, Julie, Diane, and then, oh, here's Donnie.

Mona Simpson: He was that kid who was always there and was trying not to cause too much trouble and then came into his own life. He was still trying not to cause too much trouble but ended up causing a bit of trouble.

Alison Stewart: Lina at one point comments to Donnie that she and Walter didn't have the luxury of messing up but Donnie maybe he didn't feel that way. It affects him in the most acute way. He becomes addicted to drugs. He becomes self-harming. Why did that happen to Donnie as opposed to the other two siblings?

Mona Simpson: Well, I know from the inside out. I'm not absolutely sure why that happened, but I know what it felt like for him and that's that I think he happened to be gifted. He was gifted with kids. He made friends easily. People took him up. He didn't mean that to happen, and it was one of the things that he enjoyed becoming a part of this crowd of kids who went to the beach. It was one of those things with him that the feeling he got, the feeling of comfort and ease he got the first time he got high was just intoxicating to him.

Alison Stewart: What research did you do into addiction to help craft Donnie's story?

Mona Simpson: I did some. It was a different kind of research, I think than I did for the mental health hospitals. I guess I talked to a lot of people and I read a lot of things, but I talked to more people directly. It was less reading and less, you know.

Alison Stewart: Why was that the choice you made?

Mona Simpson: I'm not sure. I wanted to understand that. I feel I have, myself, an addictive personality, although it mostly expresses itself in things like coffee.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Mona Simpson: I'm attracted to it, I guess, in some way. I'm attracted to understanding that.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting that Donnie was trying so hard to make amends and having such a difficult time of all the obstacles that could be in Donnie's way.

Mona Simpson: I know.

Alison Stewart: Why did you choose amends?

Mona Simpson: [laughs] I really like him. He's my favorite character, I think, in the book.

Alison Stewart: Oh.

Mona Simpson: I just thought it was funny that this was to happen to him.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Why is he your favorite character?

Mona Simpson: I don't know. He's very good-hearted I think. He wants the best for everyone, and he gets lucky in some ways too. He's the one who had the least of his mother at home and her former life, but he's the one who is closest to her most as an adult.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some questions from the audience.

Audience Member 1: Thank you so much. I just want to say I finished the book last night. I've been reading it very assiduously and I really appreciated it. I actually lived in Berkeley during the time of Walter and my husband went to Columbia during the time of Lina.

Mona Simpson: Oh, that's funny.

Audience Member 1: When I lived in Berkeley, my fiancé was a psychiatrist who actually started doing E [unintelligible 00:26:54] therapy, which was very upsetting to me and I went to a demonstration against it. This book just totally captivated me. It's like my life--

Mona Simpson: It's written for you.

Audience Member 1: I know.

[laughter]

Audience Member 1: You've expressed, maybe made it more clearly, but I was wondering that all the kids seemed to skirt over some of the political things, the ferment that was happening at that time, the women's movement which was so strong in Berkeley and New York and the anti-war and the anti-Nixon. I think I'm understanding you were focusing more on the psychiatric, but I'm just wondering if you had thought about including-- you do include some of that more, but including some of that [crosstalk].

Mona Simpson: Well, I definitely thought of it, but I thought of it as I think, at that time, these kids had more urgent problems than in a way the state of the nation. It's funny because Walter's roommate was very concerned about the Vietnam more and the draft. He was quite concerned about it, but Walter just felt like, "Oh, he couldn't even think about it." [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: He's got to find tuition.

Mona Simpson: I know.

Alison Stewart: He's got a mom at home who's ill.

Mona Simpson: I know. I was definitely thinking of those things for sure.

Alison Stewart: On this side of the room?

Audience Member 2: Hi.

Mona Simpson: Hi.

Audience Member 2: Thank you so much for being here. I'm really enjoying this conversation. My question is actually quite simple. I was just wondering if you could share your advice for aspiring writers.

Mona Simpson: Oh, sure. I have a lot of advice for aspiring writers because I teach, so I'm thinking about this all the time. I think the best advice I have, and it's just the simplest thing, is if you can possibly develop a practice of writing as much as possible, probably every day even if it's for not as long as you'd like every day. I would try to get over the idea that you have to have perfect conditions to start because you probably won't have perfect conditions to start. To somehow develop a confidence that you will get that time every day and you'll make that time.

I've tried many things with my students and that honestly seems to be the most effective. You can train people's ears, you can train their critical apparatus. All that helps, but honestly, if they keep writing more and more, they will solve their own problems, even if they don't know how exactly, or why exactly they're making those changes. I'm really just a believer in doing it first and foremost.

Audience Member 3: Hi. Good evening.

Mona Simpson: Hi.

Audience Member 3: Thank you for writing this book. I really appreciate you. I just want to say that, first of all.

Mona Simpson: Thank you.

Audience Member 3: As a writer, I feel that the things I write it always has a piece of me. My question to you is did you add yourself to this book? If you did, how did you decide what to share and what to share?

Mona Simpson: That's a good question. I think that's such a good question and I think there's always pieces of us in our work. Even if those around us might not know that that's a piece of us, there's always a piece of us. I think, in this book, it was a funny book for me because I grew up with a single mom who definitely suffered from some delusions and she heard voices and she had some form. I don't know that I would exactly call it mental illness, but she definitely had some, what we would call issues. I was an only child and she worked really hard and I saw the way she worked to raise me.

I could tell in a funny way that it was harder for her. Just everything was a little harder for her than it was for most people. She did her job, she was a speech therapist. She did very well at her job, she helped a lot of people, but I could tell that was hard for her, getting an apartment was hard for her, managing the money was hard for her. All of it was just hard and I remember my feeling when I was an adult was, "God, the world's kind of easy, it's kind of easy to all these things." I guess I found myself wondering if there could have been an easier way for her.

Alison Stewart: Did you realize it was hard when you were young or was that--

Mona Simpson: Yes, no, it was evident. It was very evident. Even just little things we would get locked out of the apartment, we would just not have our keys just a lot. The locksmith was there, just basic things were very hard, having groceries in the house, that sort of thing. Then, of course, I put in Berkeley and Columbia because those were schools I knew I went to, but probably lots of little, little things too.

Alison Stewart: Sure. If we have time for one more.

Audience Member 4: Hi, thank you very much for this. I love this book.

Mona Simpson: Thank you. Oh, thank you.

Audience Member 4: My question is about the title, for you, in choosing that word, does it have multiple meanings or interpretations as we learn about the characters and their different situations?

Mona Simpson: It does, and it's funny because my great editor, Ann Close, is sitting in the first row and she knows that for me, I've either had titles right at the beginning or I just haven't had a title. There are lists and lists and lists and lists and lists, but we did end up liking Commitment for that reason because we thought it applied to each of the characters in different ways. Yes, thank you for noticing that.

Alison Stewart: The characters in this book, they live separate lives, they sometimes come back in touch with each other, but there's that sense to me anyway, that they find each other as family again.

Mona Simpson: Yes, for sure. They reunite as family again. What do you hope people think about when they think about what makes a family, after reading this book? [unintelligible 00:33:20] questions, conversations about family?

Mona Simpson: It's funny, I think I read this recently. I had a marry, a nephew of mine. I was the officiant and one of the things I said was, Henry James at one point said that there are three things that are important in life. The first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind. I think of that as these people, both the friend and the three kids, they endured a lot of losses and had their own troubles that they couldn't really necessarily save each other from, but they always cared about each other and they were always kind to each other for the most part.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Mona Simpson about her new novel Commitment. It was our April Get Lit with All Of It book club selection.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Up next, singer-songwriter Hamilton Leithauser. He joined the event for two special performances and an interview about his career, his reunion with the Walkman, and the very interesting package he received that made the news earlier this year. Stay with us.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.