Acclaimed, award-winning author and University of California professor Mona Simpson has a fascinating and richly layered backstory that could easily be the subject of one of her own novels.
Simpson was born Mona Jandali in Green Bay, Wisconsin to an Arab father from Syria and a Swiss-German American mother. Joanne Schieble’s parents hotly contested her relationship with Abdulfattah "John" (al-)Jandali and threatened to disown and cut Joanne off if she continued the relationship. Jandali and Schieble were unmarried students at the University of Wisconsin when Schieble became pregnant. Fearful of her parents' reaction, Joanne gave the baby boy up for adoption. Shortly after, her father died, Schieble and Jandali were married, and Mona was born.
After finishing his doctorate, Jandali returned to Syria for work and Schieble left him, eventually marrying an ice skating teacher, George Simpson. Mona Jandali took her stepfather's last name, thus becoming Mona Simpson. She never knew she had a brother that had been placed for adoption and would be in and out of contact with her father throughout her life.
Simpson went on to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied poetry, and went to Columbia for her Master of Fine Arts. While there, she was an editor for The Paris Review. She also published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle.
After, graduation, Simpson decided to stay in New York while she worked on her first novel, “Anywhere But Here.” She won a Whiting Award for it, and the novel would go on to become a popular success and be adapted to film. A sequel, “The Lost Father,” followed.
Simpson was 25 years old at the time she was writing “Anywhere But Here” and had a job at a small magazine when she learned from a client that she had a long-lost brother. After being found by the young man, Simpson’s mother arranged for her children to finally meet. Simpson quickly formed a friendship and close relationship with her brother, who just happened to be Apple Co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs. She created a fictional portrait of Jobs in her novel, “A Regular Guy.”
Simpson’s other novels include “Off Keck Road,” “My Hollywood,” and “Casebook.” She has been the recipient of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, a Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.