My 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.

Acclaim for My Hollywood

“It is Lola, however, who holds center stage, emerging as an indelible character — as keenly observed as the mother-and-daughter pair in ‘Anywhere but Here,’ and as much an avatar, as they were, of the contingencies and compromises of the American Dream.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“[Simpson] takes us inside what once was called the heart-chamber of the world. The walls of the chamber are touched by beauty, but it echoes with the plangent sounds of love lost, love damaged, love unrequited; and with the sadness of those sighs are the music of a love unfound.”

—The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“In Mona Simpson’s new novel about a modern marriage and its discontents, the saga of its Filipina domestic sketches a new variation on the American dream…that reality runs through this intimate, ironic tale, in which Lola’s nanny allies, and adversaries, all of differing nationalities, become a brilliant Greek chorus reflecting and refracting Lola and Claire’s interdependence and their divide.”
—Lisa Shea, Elle

“The success of this absorbing novel rests on Simpson's ability to make that well-worn marital argument just as uncomfortable and perplexing as it was when you were having it with your own spouse…. Through Lola and her friends, we're introduced to a tight network of immigrant child-care workers, women charged with the ultimate responsibilities but subjected to casual humiliations, plied with lavish compliments and stung by racist assumptions, exhorted to stay except when they're being threatened with deportation. They're an agile, wary group, these nannies, sometimes servants, sometimes teachers, stand-in mothers and pinch-hitting maids. It's a poignant vision of the upstairs-downstairs structure that persists in our officially classless society. Some of the best chapters here, in Lola's voice, stand alone as powerful short stories … ‘My Hollywood’ could easily be ‘Our Country.’”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Novel by novel, Simpson takes fresh and disquieting approaches to fractured families. Her fifth book is a duet between Claire, a high-strung composer who has left New York for Hollywood to support her husband’s television ambitions, and Lola, a Filipina in her fifties who becomes their nanny, caring with sensitivity and love for their precocious, moody son. Claire is ambivalent about motherhood. Lola is putting her children through college while continuing to support their household in the Philippines, where she is of the same class as the Hollywood women who hire her to care for their children. Claire’s deepening loneliness as her workaholic husband becomes a stranger and her artistic struggle in a place she finds arid and alien are compelling, but compassionate, wise, and self-sacrificing Lola, with her mellifluous voice and wonderfully inventive English, rules. In her arresting portrayals of Lola and her nanny and housekeeper friends, Simpson explores a facet of American society rarely depicted with such insight and appreciation. As Lola and Claire tell their intertwined stories, Simpson subtly but powerfully traces the persistence of sexism and prejudice, the fear and injustice inherent in the predicaments of immigrants, and the complexity and essentiality of all domestic relationships.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist

“Heart-wrenching…Simpson’s prose is gentle but leaves a savage trail of insights including how unlikely it is for a parent, child or nanny to walk away from this awkward triangle without bruises. This is a domestic novel and a highly political one.”
—Mary Pols, TIME

“In her gradually unfolding, finely tuned narrative, Simpson shows how, for many women, the nanny-mom relationship grows to be more intimate than marriage…”
—Jane Ciabattari, NPR

“It takes a very subtle, sophisticated and confident writer to make our most common problems come off as unique on the page as they feel at 3 in the morning. If anyone can do it, Mona Simpson, author of Anywhere but Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road, can. And does. But there's more.”

—Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times

“In her first novel since Off Keck Road (2000), Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents. Claire, a new mother and composer, has moved to Santa Monica, California so that her husband Paul can follow his dreams of becoming a TV comedy writer. When Paul’s job requires late nights, Claire, already overwhelmed with balancing motherhood and career, hires Lola, a middle-aged Filipina, to help with her son, Williamo, and soon Lola’s trying to plug holes in Claire and Paul’s slowly sinking family ship. Claire and Lola narrate in alternation chapters; fragile and sometimes fierce Claire deploys a biting wit that shreds the pretensions that permeate her social life and her marriage, while Lola is more open-hearted and eager to help people, though she also draws laughs with her observations about wealthy families. The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson’s taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, oftentimes with a single biting sentence. Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson’s latest is well worth the wait.”
—Publisher's Weekly

“This is classic Simpson… she is direct, unsentimental, an observer coolly marking down the customs of the domestic world… the household dynamics, in which the most serious and potent truths are told.”
—David Ulin, O Magazine

“My Hollywood explores two different Hollywoods. There’s the one inhabited by Claire, a middling composer of classical music whose career orbit has been wobbled by a new planet—the birth of her son—and challenged by her husband’s all-consuming efforts to break into and then maintain a career as a television writer. And there’s the real focus of the book, the Hollywood inhabited by the nanny Claire has hired, Lola, an insightful Filipina who immigrated to raise money to educate her children back home. In some ways it is a familiar story. But Simpson uses these identifiable character types to examine the nature of relations, and love, and modern urban families, as children bond with immigrant hired help as readily as with their biological parents.”
—Scott Martelle, Publishers Weekly

“The two women narrate alternating chapters, and the contrast in their voices is a double-Dutch game of masterful writing: Claire, privileged and damaged, floats along in a daze of unfulfillment, while the ever-practical Lola observes the L.A. milieu with a realist’s eye in imperfect yet oddly poetic English… It’s the tender, persevering Lola who is the book’s true emotional pulse… A character as rich as Lola won’t easily fade from anyone’s mind.”
—Missy Schwartz, Entertainment Weekly

“Simpson’s novel shows the intricacies and inequities of domestic politics…

‘My Hollywood’ is a smart, topical, absorbing novel that explores the macro economy, the micro economy and the world of work, both inside and outside the home. Mona Simpson writes adroitly about domestic matters, and she knows the domestic matters.”
—Jeffrey Ann Goudie, Kansas City Star

“New mother Claire, a cellist and classical composer, is married to a workaholic TV writer and stranded in a cultural desert. Uncertain of her parenting skills and desperate for creative time, she hires a Filipina nanny, Lola. Writing in both women’s voices, Simpson (Anywhere But Here) deploys a sharp eye and mordant wit to show us the backstairs view of a Hollywood we’ve never seen.”
—Roxana Robinson, More Magazine

My Hollywood

Excerpt

I take Williamo to the post office, seal the envelope, and send my money home. Four hundred fifty this week. A ticker tape of dollars runs now all the time in my head. Last year, I totaled more than twenty thousand - in pesos, three times what Bong Bong earns, and he is executive Hallmark. This year it will be more because my weekend job. Besides what I send, I give myself allowance of five dollars for daily spending. Twenty five go to my private savings, so when I return home there will be some they did not know. Also, I need my account here for shoes or treats for Williamo or if one of the babysitters gets married. When you are working seven days, you need some your own money. And, I tell Williamo, Every day, Lola requires her coffee. Is twenty-five thousand ninety dollars enough to support a coffee habit on Montana Avenue? Lola is not a yuppie. I am here to pay tuitions and medicine; in our country, that goes ten years.

When we enter the house, the mother of Claire and her friend Tom are there. Tom says, "Two years ago, no one paid more than fifty cents for a cup of coffee! Now they’re all spending five dollars a day! That’s a five hundred percent increase." The mother of Claire goes every day to the coffee shop. But Tom, he will not attend.

"But-ah, I get the plain . Only one fifty. Plus they give the sugar we use to make the cinnamon toast." I lift a handful of natural-sugar packs from my pocket.

"Coffee costs them cents, Lola! Cents!"

Does he think I am spending the money of Claire and Paul? Compared with other parents here my employers they are not rich, but they are still rich to me. You have to pay what it costs where you live to join the club of life. Anyway, my weekend employer makes my coffee for me. I leave on the counter the receipt for tapioca and the change.

Walking to my weekend house, I hear my heart. Tops of planted grains tick my hands. Sprinklers spray a chain on my wrist. From a long time ago, I remember the strangeness that comes with hope. Love, the way I have known it - it is also dread. I move slower when I see the house. My happiest moments were before. When I first married Bong Bong, I felt afraid he would die. Then, after my children, I worried they would die. I still had long hair, like my daughters now. And every night, Bong Bong worked on my neck. "Time to work on your neck," he said. He made it a project, not a favor from him to me. He likes to turn his gifts invisible. Credit, the way children want, it would embarrass him. I lay down on the hard bed. He held my head on his knees. All those years, he never missed one night. He would start by extracting the sticks that kept up my hair. I felt the tug and loosening.

What my weekend employers want that they do not have is me. I try to keep this light in the air. When I sit on the floor playing with Bing, Helen brings me a pale green mug, steaming, the taste of something sweet and burnt.

"Drink it now, Lola. Tonight, when Jeff gets home, we’re taking you out."

The doorbell rings. Estelle, the mother of Helen, arrives to babysit. Why?

"But I am the babysitter," I say. "I will be the one to stay home."

"We want to take you."

"Three is a crowd," I say.

Helen tries to push me into the front, but I climb next to the car seat.

The restaurant it is all couples. Small candles on the tables and no children; I am not comfortable wearing my secondhand T-shirt that says HARD ROCK CAFÉ. Here, I never attend restaurants in the night. It is all going very slow.

I am looking around that no one will see us.

"Her sea bass is very good," Helen says. "And people say she does a great steak."

Employers and employees do not sit together at restaurants. I never once took my helper out to eat. She would have been embarrassed in a Manila restaurant. With the other babysitters I am the one to talk. But here, it moves too slow.

"How are your children?" Helen asks, while Jeff finally orders his food.

I say all I want is soup. I am sounding like Vicky, but he tells me he is going to order me a steak, because I never get meat at their house. "Fine," I say. "My kids they are good."

They tell me stories about Vicky. It is true, Vicky is not a good babysitter. I would never hire her for my kids. Maybe at this one thing, I am best.

"She still doesn't talk to us," Helen says. "I don’t think she ever really liked us."

"At the playclub Vicky is dal-dal." Actually, she is tomboy, what they call lesbian. She likes the mother of Bing. It is the dad she complains. "No, Vicky likes you," I say. At last, our food arrives and I keep my hands on my lap. The steak is many pounds. This is enough for the whole family of Lola. Then we eat, quiet. The guy, he is serious, deboning his fish. He finally puts down his knife. “Lola,” he says. “We’re going to fire Vicky.”

This is so fast, skidding, too soon something will be over. “But-ah, Vicky is nice” is all I can think to say. I have heard about proposals like this: professional parents go to the park to find a nanny and offer her double her salary. Maybe it is true for love also, what you see in the movies. I never believed those things before because they did not happen to me. My grandmother once saw the Virgin Mary. The Virgin sat down, moving her robe to smooth it out, when my grandmother took her lunch at the school. The robe was blue cotton, not velvet, a brighter blue than she had always pictured it, my grandmother said.

I tell my daughters, Do not trust roses; they will stink one week in the jar. Maybe I have been wrong!

But Vicky was good for me, I never minded Vicky. They like me better and that will never change. With someone new, who knows?

“Helen tells me they’re paying you fifty-five dollars.” He pauses, napkining his mouth.

They do not know my raise. I am now sixty-two fifty.

“I just signed contracts for two projects. We could start you at one hundred.”

One hundred dollars a day! Like Lita. Maybe the things I heard before – even the man in the Castle marrying the baby nurse – maybe they all come true. It feels like The End. Darkness eats in from the edges. I think of the carmelly coffee, fine silt at the bottom.

“But I will have to think,” I say.

They look at each other. It seems they were expecting me to jump.

“Tell us, Lola, if there’s anything we can do. Because we really want to have you.”

He leans over. “Would a hundred and ten make a difference?”

I say no to dessert. Outside the restaurant the sky is dark blue. They tell me I can take the night off.

“You could catch a movie.” He looks at his watch. “It’s only eight-thirty.”

Helen touches my wrist. “Either way, still friends?”

I am carrying a small heavy bag – my steak. “More than friends. You are my weekend employers.”

They laugh. For them that is a joke. For me it is not funny. If I say no, what if the person they get wants seven days? One hundred ten dollars a day! The last few minutes in the restaurant, they upped me fifty a week! More than my year raise from Claire and him. After six months, Claire raised me five dollars a day and again when he turned two, seven-fifty. I walk around the dark neighborhood, past houses where I know children, entering a room of jasmine and a smell of pepper. After one more year, Williamo he will start in the school.

I always work for free the day of his birthday and the one before. For their wedding anniversary, I give a weekend. I throw in the Friday night. And they celebrate the anniversary of my coming by raising me. So when Williamo turned two, that is when I became .50. Some of my friends get more, but their employers, they are rich. Also, if Claire asks me to work late, she will pay extra. Many here pay one price for live-in. No matter what you have to do. I always say to them, “As long as I am needed.” But 0 every day! Five days or seven. Up to me. That is 0 a week instead of 2.50. Per year, an extra ,950. My God. I think I have to take that. Plus in that house, I will have my coffee made every day. That is 6 saved. Helen is young. They will want more kids. Maybe two more. This is a good job for a long time. I walk all the way to the ocean to say good morning to the Philippines.