Mona Simpson

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For the fictional character from The Simpsons, see Mona Simpson (The Simpsons).

Mona Simpson (born June 14, 1957 in Green Bay, Wisconsin) is a novelist and essayist. She was born to an American mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, and a Syrian father, political science professor Abdulfattah John Jandali. She is the younger biological sister of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer. Jobs was given up for adoption as a baby by his then-unmarried mother; the two siblings only met each other as adults.

She attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied with Jackson Burgess, Earl Thompson, and Thom Gunn. Having received her B.A. in English from Berkeley in 1979, she attended Columbia University where she received an M.F.A. She worked for Paris Review and also for Cosmopolitan during this period.

At Columbia she began her first published novel, Anywhere But Here, the story of a turbulent mother-daughter relationship, which became a bestseller when it was published by Knopf in 1986. Anywhere But Here was followed by The Lost Father and A Regular Guy, a fictional portrait of her brother. She has since published the novel Off Keck Road.

In the book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, author Alan Deutschman says that "Mona exploited her personal experiences for the material in her fiction. After publishing books about the emotional struggles of growing up with a demanding mother and an absent father, it wasn't surprising that she should decide to write about her brother."

Mona Simpson is also a contributor to anthologies and essay collections. She currently lives in Santa Monica, California with her husband Richard Appel and two children, Gabriel and Grace.

External links

[Random House biography]
[1992 audio interview of Mona Simpson, RealAudio]
http://www.theharvardadvocate.com/archives/driving.html

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