Born in Wisconsin, Mona Simpson is descended, on her mother’s side, from a Green Bay mink farmer. Her mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, was a speech pathologist who taught stroke victims to talk again, and her father was an immigrant from Syria. After her parents divorced, in 1962, Mona, then five, lost touch with her father, eventually moving to Los Angeles with her mom. She received a scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied poetry with Leonard Michaels, Ishmael Reed, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, and Josephine Miles. As Joan Didion had years earlier, Simpson won the prestigious Mademoiselle Guest Editor competition. Josephine Miles told Simpson that when Joan Didion won, she stood on top of the classroom desk, raised one arm, and said, “I’m going to New York City.” Simpson would make the same move. 

In her twenties, she enrolled in Columbia’s MFA program and also secured a work-study position at The Paris Review, living off nine thousand dollars a year. Her teachers at Columbia included Elizabeth Hardwick, Edmund White, and New Yorker fiction editor Charles “Chip” McGrath. While in school, Simpson worked on her first novel, Anywhere but Here, and years of revision followed. It’s a dexterous book about the relationship between a mother and daughter. It became a bestseller and was adapted into a film starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon.