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My Hollywood. Mona Simpson (2012)

by Mona Simpson(Favorite Author)

3.05 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1780332203 (ISBN13: 9781780332208)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Corsair

review 1: Claire and Paul move to L.A. for Paul to pursue a television writing career while Claire continues to compose music. But with the birth of their son Will, they find it hard to balance their careers and parenthood so they hire a nanny, Lola, from the Philippines. The story is told by both Claire and Lola, through alternating chapters. What I did like about this book are Claire's struggles with becoming a parent, her marriage, and maintaining some kind of individual identity. But I also struggled to get through this book and did not always follow what was going on in Lola's chapters with many other nannies and their chargers referred to, but not developed.
review 2: 3.5 stars. Since Amazon bought GoodReads, I've been hoping they'd implement half-stars. That wo... moreuld be a nice little improvement. Oh well. This novel. I feel like it could have lost half its pages and been a stronger book. Lola was an amazing character, well-developed with a strong voice. She was a real person to me. Claire, the other narrator, was a weak, boring person. I feel like the author didn't do enough research into the lives of professional/aspiring composers when she was creating the character. As someone who has studied a little music theory, I was left feeling as if this character, who supposedly spent her life steeped in music, was unrealistic. She didn't seem like a musician, a composer. If anything, she struck me more as a frustrated writer. Yet Claire's inability to handle her under-developed career and her young child is one of the main plot points of the novel. She just ended up seeming like a crappy composer and a mediocre mother, to me. Maybe that was Simpson's intent -- while the novel deals with the socio-political question of hiring domestics, it also comes back to the oft repeated question of, "Can a woman 'have it all?'" Simpson examines this question from many angles and seems to conclude that the answer is a resounding no -- but that's also for a character who seemed hesitant about having children in the first place. If Claire had been a better written character, I could see this novel standing as a strong argument for following one's dreams and not getting sidelined by traditional expectations, but as it is, she just comes off as weak and sad. less

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