My Hollywood

This story of competing priorities--between family life and career--is told from the contrasting perspectives of a mother and a nanny. Bhama Roget's talented performance alternates between a subtle, flat accent for Claire and a lilting intonation for Filipina nanny Lola. Claire is torn between her career as a cellist and composer and her life with her husband, a TV joke writer, and her son, Willie. Claire is always looking for something she doesn't have, and Roget portrays her as flat, sad, and unfulfilled. In contrast, Roget's engaging reading of Lola's life as a nanny to American children shows how Lola charms her way to success in America. While Hollywood seems glamorous from the outside, Roget dramatization of the contrasting dreams of each character makes this world seem more real. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from June 28, 2010
In her first novel since Off Keck Road (2000), Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents. Claire, a composer and new mother, has moved to Santa Monica, Calif., 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, William, and soon Lola's trying to plug holes in Claire and Paul's slowly sinking family ship. Claire and Lola narrate in alternating 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, often times 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.