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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. Let's get the hour started with Mona Simpson.

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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 but when they returned, Diane gets into bed and doesn't leave. Eventually, She's 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, and Donny, the youngest child ends caught up in a spiral of addiction. Walter, Lina, and Donny 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. It was our April Get Lit with All Of It book club selection.

Mona Simpson joined us for a live event last week. As the book is so much about mental health, we thought airing it today would be a great way to kick off mental health awareness month, 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 mean, 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, some 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: Why did you start the store in the 1970s?

Mona: 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, and 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: What creative opportunities did it provide for you to set it in the '70s?

Mona: I felt it was, in a way, the last moment one could have an experience there. I think that what we tend to believe what I tended to believe, I was a normal person who went and saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 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 Sacks wrote a piece I read, which quoted a lot of patients who would actually had safety and security in these places that no longer for the most part exist anymore.

Alison: 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: Well, 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 and a lot of ways, so that's the fun part. It's going back and listening to the music and seeing the fashions, and all that.

Alison: What were you listening to?

Mona: Oh, I was listening to a lot of things. A lot of things you listened 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: Are you someone who listens to music when you write, before you write after you write?

Mona: Around when I write.

Alison: Around.

Mona: Not during. I like to hear the words.

Alison: 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: I wasn't sure. I don't think of her as she-- it's true that she never leaves the institution once she's there. I don't think of her as having had a terrible life there. She finds a niche there that she feels useful. She is 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 the book, there's fewer and fewer choices, and the end becomes inevitable.

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

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

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

Mona: I feel that the choices your unconscious makes may be through your characters, through your situation.

Alison: Because her illness is her whole life, even though she does not live it when 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: Well, one thing I wanted to explore in this particular novel 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 who one marries, you think in the English novel. The fact is, friendship is often one of the most unsung relationships in literature. It's one of the most important or at least it was for these kids, in this time that 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 put his kids.

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

Mona: 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 made family not necessarily a born family.

Alison: Chosen family.

Mona: Yes.

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

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

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

Mona: I think so too.

Alison: The children's father is fairly absent, absent from their daily lives. At one point, Lina, the daughter turns to him hoping that he'll give her some money, he gives her a couple $100. Pretty much the kids don't interact with him at all, but we 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: It's funny. As with many characters, often I think writers know a lot more about the characters than go into the book. I read 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: Why did you think you needed it before you cut it?

Mona: 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. 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: Does that help you as an author to just go ahead, write this whole scene, and then okay, well, this helps me get to the next place, or is it very hard to decide to make these [unintelligible 00:09:24] think to leave it on the floor.

Mona: 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: How does his absence affect his children?

Mona: Well, 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. Probably all kinds of ways.

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

Mona: 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: Was it something particular about Walter or was it just a change of the alchemy in the house?

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: The siblings all react in such different ways and sets them off on different paths. As you think about your characters and 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: 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. I think they do react in very different ways and 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: Walter, he keeps saying, "Should I come home?" Everybody's like, "No, no, 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--

Mona: He feels he's not quite wanted back home. They keep telling him she would want him 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.

There's 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. He just doesn't quite know. I think in retrospect, he wishes he had.

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

Mona: He starts selling bicycles.

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

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

Alison: You attended UC Berkeley in the '70s.

Mona: I did.

Alison: 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: 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 dint 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 a moving thing.

Alison: That's also a subtext in the-- It's part of the book story and part of the themes, the idea that how precarious one's financial health can be. How it's so easy for someone--

Mona: Who does all the right things to fall off--

Alison: To fall through the cracks.

Mona: It's really true. It's funny. A friend of mine read this book and said to me, "Gosh, education means a lot to you." I realized how far socioeconomically I'd come in my life. 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. Yet, when the moment came, a lot of people couldn't make the leap, even if they were qualified, even if they knew 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: Also the need for it in some cases. Not a really an option.

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

Alison: Each of the kids has various coping mechanisms even into young adulthood, some of them not the healthiest. Donny 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: Lina does that thing I was just talking about. She does something presumptuous. She wants to go to a fancy col. 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. In fact, she does not get in.

She gets waitlisted at one of them. 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, but 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. Then she has a high school teacher who's very intent on getting her back to college. Eventually, she does get in off the waitlist after some months.

Alison: To 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: It's a Persian name. There are a lot of Persian teachers in LA.

Alison: How do you pick your characters' names?

Mona: 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 ethnicity is in names.

Alison: 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: It's funny. I just sat 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 the way it is.

[laughter]

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 women's magazines, I proposed an article in which I studied Flaubert and Tolstoy. 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 romantic novels, the dark handsome stranger was always the dark handsome stranger.

[laughter]

Alison: Does she consider her looks currency?

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

Alison: Still. Even still. 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.

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This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison 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.

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Walter becomes a bit obsessed with architecture as 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: 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, 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, and that was meant to be curative. This was taken up by the earliest psychiatrists in the United States who, and 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 while they lived there and also to recover. He had the doctors, it was a wing like structure, and the doctors and the nurses would themselves live in the central part of it.

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: We don't get much into Donny'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 Donny.

Mona: 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: Lina at one point comments to Donny that she and Walter didn't have the luxury of messing up but Donny, maybe he didn't feel that way. Why do you think it's that that-- Donny really, it affects him in the most acute way. He becomes addicted to drugs, he becomes self-harming. Why did that happen to Donny as opposed to the other two siblings?

Mona: Well, I know from the inside out, I'm not absolutely sure why that happened, but I know what it felt like for him. 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.

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 the first time he got high was just intoxicating to him.

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

Mona: 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--

Alison: Why was that the [crosstalk]

Mona: 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.

[laughter]

I don't know, I'm attracted to it, I guess, in some way I'm attracted to understanding that.

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

Mona: I know.

Alison: -why did you choose amends?

Mona: I really like him. He's my favorite character, I think, in the book. I just thought it was funny that this would happen to him.

Alison: Why is he your favorite character?

Mona: I don't know. He's very goodhearted, 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 in her former life but he's the one who is closest to her most as an adult.

Alison: 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: Oh, that's funny.

Audience Member 1: When I lived in Berkeley, my fiance was a psychiatrist who actually started doing shock therapy, which was very upsetting to me. I went to a demonstration against it so this book just totally captivated me.

Mona: It's written for you I think.

[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 that--

Mona: 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 War and the draft and he was quite concerned about it, but Walter just felt like, oh, he couldn't even think about it.

Alison: He's got to find tuition.

Mona: I know.

Alison: He's got a mom at home.

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

Alison: On this side of the room.

Audience Member 2: Hi.

Mona: Hi.

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

Mona: 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 and to somehow develop a confidence that you will get that time every day and you'll make that time. I find that, I don't know. 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: Hi.

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

Mona: 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, and if you did, how did you decide what to share and what was-- yes, what to share?

Mona: 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, 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 to-- I saw the way she worked to raise me, and 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 a job. She was a speech therapist. She did very well at her job. She helped a lot of people, but I could tell that 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. I remember my feeling when I was an adult was, "God, the world's easy. It's easy to do all these things." I guess I found myself wondering if there could have been an easier way for her.

Alison: Did you realize it was hard when you were young or is that [unintelligible 00:31:41]?

Mona: No, it was evident. It was very evident. Even just the little things. We would get locked out of the apartment. We would just not have our keys just a lot, so the locksmith is 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 things to show.

Alison: If we have time for one more.

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

Mona: Thank you. Well, thank you.

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

Mona: It does. 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, so yes, thank you for noticing that.

Alison: 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: Yes, for sure.

Alison: They reunite as a family again. What do you hope people think about when they think about what makes a family after reading this book? What are some questions, conversations about family?

Mona: It's funny. I think I read this recently. I had to 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: 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.

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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.

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