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Mayan Stevenson #1
Anywhere But Here
Published originally in 1987, Mona Simpson's first novel is now available in paperback. It tells the story of a mother and daughter who make their way west from Wisconsin, living off an ex-husband's credit card.
416 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1986
About the author
Mona Simpson
28 books396 followersMona Simpson was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, then moved to Los Angeles as a young teenager. Her father was a recent immigrant from Syria and her mother was the daughter of a mink farmer and the first person in her family to attend college. Simpson went to Berkeley, where she studied poetry. She worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia’s MFA program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road.
Her work has been awarded several prizes: A Whiting Prize, A Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She worked ten years on My Hollywood. “It’s the book that took me too long because it meant to much to me,” she says.
Mona lives in Santa Monica with her two children and Bartelby the dog.
For more about upcoming readings and events, visit Mona's website http://www.monasimpson.com
and her Facebook author page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mona-Si...
Her work has been awarded several prizes: A Whiting Prize, A Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She worked ten years on My Hollywood. “It’s the book that took me too long because it meant to much to me,” she says.
Mona lives in Santa Monica with her two children and Bartelby the dog.
For more about upcoming readings and events, visit Mona's website http://www.monasimpson.com
and her Facebook author page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mona-Si...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 287 reviews
March 5, 2012
This is a wonderful novel. It is about the relationship between a mother and daughter -Adele and Ann. They journey together to California, to a life Adele is seeking but can never attain. She can never attain what she is seeking partly because she is unable to accept what she has, partly due to not recognizing what it is she is and is seeking, and partly due to her crazy longing for a self and way of life that is not embedded in reality.
Adele is crazy, cruel, self-centered , almost sociopathic, yet she has a uniqueness and childlike quality that is almost endearing. ann has her mother's tendencies, but at the same time, the ability to recognize this and want to change herself and escape from her demons while there is still time. The reader views the gradual and almost total disintegration of the last vestiges of Adele's stability.
Adele takes Ann to California so that Ann can become a child star and yet, when Ann actually is able to make it, Adele tries to destroy this possibility. We watch Adele's zany and crazy actions - letting Ann off in the middle of highways, becoming obsessed with her psychiatrist (pretending he's marrying her), her lies, her cheating, and her deceit.
There is a telling paragraph - just a few lines - that let us know how Adele had Ann pose for pornographic photos when she was a young child. However, it's a short paragraph, of no tremendous significance in light of the reality of Adele and Ann's relationship. Taken alone, it might be abhorrent. In context, it's merely sad. Their relationship is cemented. Despite love, hate, anger, and all the other emotions that come into play, the reality is their eternal bond - the arc of continuity even in separation and isolation.
The enduring quality of love and the cement of family and relationships is the zeitgeist of this book. And it is a wonderful book indeed. Simpson can describe the ordinary in a visually poetic and profound way. Her imagery is new and jolts the reader with its visual beauty and power.
Adele is crazy, cruel, self-centered , almost sociopathic, yet she has a uniqueness and childlike quality that is almost endearing. ann has her mother's tendencies, but at the same time, the ability to recognize this and want to change herself and escape from her demons while there is still time. The reader views the gradual and almost total disintegration of the last vestiges of Adele's stability.
Adele takes Ann to California so that Ann can become a child star and yet, when Ann actually is able to make it, Adele tries to destroy this possibility. We watch Adele's zany and crazy actions - letting Ann off in the middle of highways, becoming obsessed with her psychiatrist (pretending he's marrying her), her lies, her cheating, and her deceit.
There is a telling paragraph - just a few lines - that let us know how Adele had Ann pose for pornographic photos when she was a young child. However, it's a short paragraph, of no tremendous significance in light of the reality of Adele and Ann's relationship. Taken alone, it might be abhorrent. In context, it's merely sad. Their relationship is cemented. Despite love, hate, anger, and all the other emotions that come into play, the reality is their eternal bond - the arc of continuity even in separation and isolation.
The enduring quality of love and the cement of family and relationships is the zeitgeist of this book. And it is a wonderful book indeed. Simpson can describe the ordinary in a visually poetic and profound way. Her imagery is new and jolts the reader with its visual beauty and power.
February 2, 2020
I've had this book for so long, I'm not sure where I got it. Started reading it for the first time recently because my two-year-old pulled it off the shelf and put it in my lap on a lazy day when we weren't doing much. I was pleasantly surprised when, after reading 2 or 3 pages, I realized I was really interested in learning more about the characters. It moved quickly and easily.
While you realize pretty quickly that things are not quite right between the main characters, and that poor 12-year-old Ann is surely suffering because of it, it takes a little while to realize just how grim Ann's existence really is, and just how sick her mother really is. Then you start to think of all the people in your life who they remind you of, and you feel kind of creepy. Still and all, Ann is a compelling protagonist.
Until about a quarter of the way into chapter 3. This is where things get really disturbing. Ann, who is somewhere between the ages of 9 and 12 begins luring young children to her house, asking them to take off their clothes, and taking pictures of them. She apparently touches them as well. Now I'm not a prude, and I certainly don't believing in burning or banning books, but this is the first time in my life that I've felt like straight-up throwing a book in the trash. This scene, which runs about 3-pages in length, made my skin crawl. I don't really want to continue reading at this point, and am disgusted by what I read to the point that I'm sorry I read it.
I'm quite sure the rest of this book is probably a good read. It is quite dark and depressing, but that's never kept me from enjoying a book. I think this one just crossed my personal comfort line. Kids molesting kids is just too much for me.
While you realize pretty quickly that things are not quite right between the main characters, and that poor 12-year-old Ann is surely suffering because of it, it takes a little while to realize just how grim Ann's existence really is, and just how sick her mother really is. Then you start to think of all the people in your life who they remind you of, and you feel kind of creepy. Still and all, Ann is a compelling protagonist.
Until about a quarter of the way into chapter 3. This is where things get really disturbing. Ann, who is somewhere between the ages of 9 and 12 begins luring young children to her house, asking them to take off their clothes, and taking pictures of them. She apparently touches them as well. Now I'm not a prude, and I certainly don't believing in burning or banning books, but this is the first time in my life that I've felt like straight-up throwing a book in the trash. This scene, which runs about 3-pages in length, made my skin crawl. I don't really want to continue reading at this point, and am disgusted by what I read to the point that I'm sorry I read it.
I'm quite sure the rest of this book is probably a good read. It is quite dark and depressing, but that's never kept me from enjoying a book. I think this one just crossed my personal comfort line. Kids molesting kids is just too much for me.
May 9, 2011
Great multi-generational physchological study of the female coming-of-age experience! Also, a STELLAR first novel by Steve Jobs' biological sister.
November 29, 2019
This novel gets a ton of praise, but it was a disappointing read for me. Some of the best parts were 500 pages in. Why did we have to wait so long to get to them. I suspect in three months I won't recall anything about it.
April 5, 2022
Simpson has a great voice as a writer. Her characters and their dialogue are both top-level. Why then, was it so frustrating to read this book? Because there is no intelligible plot or story arc. After a couple hundred pages I began to realize there was a series of really nice scenes, one after another, but none of them were furthering an overall plot. The story just meanders aimlessly. Simpson needed an editor to keep this book grounded and guided with purpose. Instead, I got the impression the editor was in love with the author's writing and simply sat back and let the author write hundreds of pages. That isn't always a bad thing, but in this case the result is a 500+ page book with no plot, no climax, and no resolution, and because of that it felt like a huge waste of time even though the characters were interesting.
March 7, 2012
Mona Simpson is Steve Jobs' sister and I first heard about this book in Jobs' autobiography by Walter Isaacson. The book was given rave reviews wherever I looked, but I just couldn't get into it. I found it quite dark and depressing - not the genre I want to be in right now. I'll give it another go sometime soon. What I did read was definitely well-written.
April 21, 2016
Fragmented, tedious and just strange. Read to within 50 pages of the end then realized I had no interest to see if the story line ever came together.
November 3, 2008
"Strangers always love my mother," Ann August tells us at the start of Anywhere But Here. "And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, fair." Indeed, over the course of the dozen or so years chronicled in Mona Simpson's first novel, Ann and everyone else related to the charming, delusional Adele learn this the hard way. Ann does hate her at times; Adele does indeed come pretty close to ruining Ann's life on numerous occasions, or at least scarring it, and yet, ultimately, it isn't possible not to love her. As Ann puts it: "The thing about my mother and me is that when we get along we're just the same."
This is a woman who uproots her child from Wisconsin and moves to Los Angeles, leaving behind a dull husband (not Ann's father--who wandered off long ago but makes appearances here in memories), under the premise that life will be beautiful and Ann will become a famous television star. But her lifelong dream and goal ("It was our secret, a nighttime whispered promise" turns out, like so many things in the Augusts' lives, to be lackluster when it becomes reality. Adele merely feeds on fantasy and drags her daughter along.
Nevertheless, it's hard not to worship her. We hear from her mother, her sister, from Ann, and finally from Adele herself, and no matter how she's used people, what trouble she's gotten into, or what lies she's told--and there are plenty of all three--a certain amount of awe always remains. When we come upon Ann's proclamation that "it's always the people like my mother, who start the noise and bang things, who make you feel the worst; they are the ones who get your love." It's startling to realize how heartily we agree with her. Anywhere But Here gives truth to this statement in a way that few books ever have. It's dense with misery and amazement all tangled together--a realistic and thus rare portrait of love. --Melanie Rehak
This is a woman who uproots her child from Wisconsin and moves to Los Angeles, leaving behind a dull husband (not Ann's father--who wandered off long ago but makes appearances here in memories), under the premise that life will be beautiful and Ann will become a famous television star. But her lifelong dream and goal ("It was our secret, a nighttime whispered promise" turns out, like so many things in the Augusts' lives, to be lackluster when it becomes reality. Adele merely feeds on fantasy and drags her daughter along.
Nevertheless, it's hard not to worship her. We hear from her mother, her sister, from Ann, and finally from Adele herself, and no matter how she's used people, what trouble she's gotten into, or what lies she's told--and there are plenty of all three--a certain amount of awe always remains. When we come upon Ann's proclamation that "it's always the people like my mother, who start the noise and bang things, who make you feel the worst; they are the ones who get your love." It's startling to realize how heartily we agree with her. Anywhere But Here gives truth to this statement in a way that few books ever have. It's dense with misery and amazement all tangled together--a realistic and thus rare portrait of love. --Melanie Rehak
July 4, 2018
2.5 stars
I'm confused by the rave reviews for this book. The mother-daughter relationship is a pivotal, intriguing, and never simple one, and I suppose the multi-generational, semi-memoir like point of view changes gave interesting insight into this particular mother-daughter relationship, but really, this book was a long, boring look at a delusional mother and what she puts her daughter Ann through. But Ann's voice was the weakest in the book in my opinion, and while she gained my sympathy for dealing with her mother, I never quite liked her either.
I'm confused by the rave reviews for this book. The mother-daughter relationship is a pivotal, intriguing, and never simple one, and I suppose the multi-generational, semi-memoir like point of view changes gave interesting insight into this particular mother-daughter relationship, but really, this book was a long, boring look at a delusional mother and what she puts her daughter Ann through. But Ann's voice was the weakest in the book in my opinion, and while she gained my sympathy for dealing with her mother, I never quite liked her either.
August 7, 2011
I recently reread this book and loved it. I think Simpson sets the stage for many of the disenchanted teenage girls who have since become so important in the cultural dialogue (I'm thinking about My So-Called Life and Daria, maybe even Buffy), or at least among Gen-Xers, and the mother Adele is a pitch-perfect description of someone sadly/hilariously on the brink of losing her sanity. I will never not love this book, sorry haters!
June 4, 2013
A brilliantly drawn portrait of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship (along with tour-de-force sketches of their kin) that is both eccentric and eerily familiar. We can't believe such a selfish, smart, dysfunctional mother exists, yet still empathize and even recognize flashes of our own motives in her. We ache for the daughter and wonder how she will survive and keep bouncing back (and always again toward her mother!) This is one of those master novels that makes cinema-lovers like me think movies are a feeble, one-dimensional medium. The authentic voices, the sense of time and place, and the expression of change (and stasis) over a family's life arc a reading experience for every lover of great novels.
July 3, 2021
DNF. The writing itself wasn't bad, Simpson is good with prose. But the plot was a confusing mish-mash of flashbacks and current time settings. The flashbacks weren't in any set order, so the non-linear nature made it hard to follow. The narration also shifts between different characters. DNF'd it at the halfway point after trying to make sense of the plot.
EDIT 7/3/21: Tried reading it a second time. Wasn't any better. It's a confusing mess of viewpoints that shift back and forth in the timeline. Adele is a narcisstic bitch. Ann gets annoying in some areas. The aunt/sister and mother viewpoints were really not needed and didn't add much in the way of rounding any of the characters out.
EDIT 7/3/21: Tried reading it a second time. Wasn't any better. It's a confusing mess of viewpoints that shift back and forth in the timeline. Adele is a narcisstic bitch. Ann gets annoying in some areas. The aunt/sister and mother viewpoints were really not needed and didn't add much in the way of rounding any of the characters out.
September 29, 2018
I wanted to like this book but it just never gave me a reason. The prose itself is just okay, nothing beautiful or profound or meaningful...and the characters... really hard to care about them although some were worse than others. The story, while spanning years, gives us only a glimpse into these bizarre, disturbing people, and their bizarre, disturbing lives...never anything in depth. By the lackluster ending, I felt only that I’d learned about a few events in their lives but never got to really know them. And the book was so....blah....that I didn’t much care.
February 1, 2012
Slow, boring and dull, this book disappoints. The last straw was when the daughter starts taking semi-pornographic photos of other children. I don't find this engaging or entertaining. It just gives me a bad feeling all over.
Nor did I find the mother to be a particularly engaging character.
I tried three times to read this book and finally gave up.
Nor did I find the mother to be a particularly engaging character.
I tried three times to read this book and finally gave up.
July 6, 2009
I vacillated between two and three stars for this one - a lot of what I disliked were actually the book's strengths - but felt too negatively to go the extra star.
This book centers around a selfish, immature and heavily delusional mother who packs up her daughter and runs off to California to pursue the daughter's Hollywood career. Through a series of linked annecdotes and flashbacks the reader eventually pieces together all the ways this mother has let Ann down and in many ways created their problems and in essence taken advantage of her power as a mother.
So on the one hand I think Simpsin does a fantastic job sketching the Mom whose name escapes me at the moment - she definitely irritates the reader which creates indirect sympathy for Ann - yet, it's hard to have a central annoying character without someone else redeeming to focus on, and Ann as victim wasn't enogh - she didn't have enough of a voice, in my mind, for there to be real motivation to see this book through.
As to the writing, everything else fell away - the mom was characterized very well (albeit really annoyingly, and difficult to read at times, as she time and again put herself first and then made Ann feel bad for being 'selfish') but there were a lot of avenues that were not explored, a lot of plot twists that were not explained, and Ann's growth of finally learning to take a stand for herself didn't seem to come about through real development.
I think the premise was interesting and it was certainly readable, but overall Simpson;s writing was weak when it came to the general narrative - there was a lot of talking to the reader and little subtlety, and a lot of linked narratives that ended up just confusing the overall focus.
This book centers around a selfish, immature and heavily delusional mother who packs up her daughter and runs off to California to pursue the daughter's Hollywood career. Through a series of linked annecdotes and flashbacks the reader eventually pieces together all the ways this mother has let Ann down and in many ways created their problems and in essence taken advantage of her power as a mother.
So on the one hand I think Simpsin does a fantastic job sketching the Mom whose name escapes me at the moment - she definitely irritates the reader which creates indirect sympathy for Ann - yet, it's hard to have a central annoying character without someone else redeeming to focus on, and Ann as victim wasn't enogh - she didn't have enough of a voice, in my mind, for there to be real motivation to see this book through.
As to the writing, everything else fell away - the mom was characterized very well (albeit really annoyingly, and difficult to read at times, as she time and again put herself first and then made Ann feel bad for being 'selfish') but there were a lot of avenues that were not explored, a lot of plot twists that were not explained, and Ann's growth of finally learning to take a stand for herself didn't seem to come about through real development.
I think the premise was interesting and it was certainly readable, but overall Simpson;s writing was weak when it came to the general narrative - there was a lot of talking to the reader and little subtlety, and a lot of linked narratives that ended up just confusing the overall focus.
August 9, 2010
Mona Simpson's debut novel is pretty much a memoir, which could be titled "This Girl's Life." It's a tale of a single mother (Adele) and her daughter (Ann) and the challenges they face over the years, first in Wisconsin where Adele's from and later in SoCal when Ann's a tween/teen and her mother has delusions of making her a child star.
Of interest to me, which I discovered only after starting this book, is that Simpson is married to Richard Appel, producer of The Simpsons, hence the character Mona Simpson who is Homer's mom. More interesting, however, is that Steve Jobs is her long-lost brother (He'd been given away for adoption before she was born and the two never knew they were siblings until well into adulthood). Their father was a Syrian academic who left Simpson's mother when she was three (she's since written a book about her search for him).
Anyway, much of the autobiographical info regarding Simpson's upbringing makes its way into the book. The book is written in first person but via three separate POV's: Ann's, Adele's and Carol's (Adele's sister and Carol's aunt). Most of the book takes the voice of Ann, retrospectively, and is ably done. The daily struggles the girl and her mother endured--always trying to live above their means while barely staying afloat, are effectively drawn in compelling fashion. However, the other sections of the book are done in summary, and seem largely pointless, providing background to gaps in the story which aren't worth filling. I'd suggest skipping those sections altogether, it would make the book a much more pleasurable read...
Of interest to me, which I discovered only after starting this book, is that Simpson is married to Richard Appel, producer of The Simpsons, hence the character Mona Simpson who is Homer's mom. More interesting, however, is that Steve Jobs is her long-lost brother (He'd been given away for adoption before she was born and the two never knew they were siblings until well into adulthood). Their father was a Syrian academic who left Simpson's mother when she was three (she's since written a book about her search for him).
Anyway, much of the autobiographical info regarding Simpson's upbringing makes its way into the book. The book is written in first person but via three separate POV's: Ann's, Adele's and Carol's (Adele's sister and Carol's aunt). Most of the book takes the voice of Ann, retrospectively, and is ably done. The daily struggles the girl and her mother endured--always trying to live above their means while barely staying afloat, are effectively drawn in compelling fashion. However, the other sections of the book are done in summary, and seem largely pointless, providing background to gaps in the story which aren't worth filling. I'd suggest skipping those sections altogether, it would make the book a much more pleasurable read...
July 14, 2011
I'm sort of undecided about this one. At first (and actually probably until about halfway through the book) I really liked it. I was ok with the meandering plot because I enjoyed her style of writing and her ability to make you empathize with the characters. I didn't mind reading the same event from different characters' perspectives. However, my enthusiasm dropped off after sticking with it and waiting for something monumental to happen. But I just finished the book, and here I am, still waiting. So I don't know, maybe that was the point? I understood that Adele lived in a complete fantasy world and was out of touch with any sort of reality - who thinks eating an ice cream cone for dinner every night or chateaubriand in a completely unfurnished house is normal? But honestly I didn't really care for Ann either. Although it was probably not the easiest thing to have to practicallly raise herself since Adele was out to lunch. Anyway I was ready for the book to end, and I think it probably should have ended about 200 pages earlier. So if you've got the extra time, go for it, but don't expect a whole lot of suspense...
May 23, 2013
i saw the movie first, many years ago, and it barely scratched the surface of the depth of these characters. the movie almost made the mother, adelle, seem like "any kooky mom" with delusions of greatness. any american can relate, right? but immediately upon reading the book, i could see that adelle was not just kooky or starstruck, this was a woman suffering from a serious mental disorder. she seemed to meet all 9 traits for borderline personality disorder (http://www.parent2parentbpd.org/wowbb...).
one of the main themes in this book is boundaries between family members and people in general, and how if they are blurred/trampled upon in childhood (whether through sexual, physical, or verbal abuse) there are lasting effects into adulthood. effects that are passed on through the generations in devastating ways. the book was super disturbing to read, but i could tell that the daughter ann had a firmer sense of boundaries, and that gave me hope for her future. i trusted ann, saw myself in her, and respected her, despite her many many faults and blemishes.
one of the main themes in this book is boundaries between family members and people in general, and how if they are blurred/trampled upon in childhood (whether through sexual, physical, or verbal abuse) there are lasting effects into adulthood. effects that are passed on through the generations in devastating ways. the book was super disturbing to read, but i could tell that the daughter ann had a firmer sense of boundaries, and that gave me hope for her future. i trusted ann, saw myself in her, and respected her, despite her many many faults and blemishes.
March 9, 2009
This book has two major strikes against it: the fact that it was later made into a movie starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman, and the fact that there is neither plot not conclusion. But I still loved the writing and the characterization of everyone except the mother character, who was clearly supposed to be this charming but shiftless Unique Person, and I had very little sympathy for her. But I loved a lot of the other voices in the book, especially the sections that were told from the daughter's perspective as a child living with her unstable family. And as I said, the writing could be really excellent--every 10 or so pages, the author would use a phrase that was just really fresh and memorable (describing conversations with her dad that went nowhere as "lighting single matches," etc.)
November 3, 2015
F@$!#&* comma splices!! Reading this drove me crazy. I couldn't decide whether to be more annoyed by the sentences, the narrative (lack of) structure, or the celebrated assholery of the characters.
Thematically, this book is right up my alley, and I wanted to like it, but it was so poorly executed.
Don't even get me started on the wrong Great Lake...
Thematically, this book is right up my alley, and I wanted to like it, but it was so poorly executed.
Don't even get me started on the wrong Great Lake...
April 17, 2009
The New York Times Book Review said it was "Brilliant, funny, astonishing."
I found it random, weird, and so astonishing at one part that I stopped wasting my time.
I found it random, weird, and so astonishing at one part that I stopped wasting my time.
December 26, 2016
A masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. One of the great mother-daughter relationships I've found in literature. Also a terrific chronicle of not-so-long-ago Los Angeles. It's marvelous and masterful the way we float through time, rarely certain of Ann's age, oddly distanced from many key events by a dispassionate, unreliable narrator who's herself trying to sort through the story of her life. The subtle evolution of Ann's voice over the years is deft and exquisite, the abstracted innocence of her very early self, the embittered intelligence of her final years of dependence to her mother. The competing themes of intergenerational drift and the indivisibility of familial bonds are more tangibly confirmed through long transcripts of interviews that are counterposed against the narrative proper--interviews which are so real it's hard to believe they aren't based on actual dialogs Simpson conducted with family members. It's incredible, by the end, this feeling of so many miles having been traversed despite how little of the book is actually spent on the road, and despite how impressionistically and poetically Simpson renders such enormous chunks of Ann's adolescence and schooling; Ann truly has come of age, and yet she's still so young. And even as she leaves her mother behind, we know: she'll never truly be free of her.
February 2, 2017
To start off there may or may not be spoilers in this review. This book was a push and pull between 2 and 3 stars for me. I had hope that this would be a story told from the mothers and the daughters point of view about Ann going up but the reader only hears from Ann and occasionally her Aunt. In the end, it felt like a rambling diary of a young adult remembering her life through “grown up” eyes. I have enjoyed some alternative non-linear storytelling and do not believe this is why I did not enjoy this book. It just felt the most interesting stories where mention in a one-off sentence or paragraph. When I was done with the book I wished more was written about the other characters; Aunt Carol’s over sea adventures when she was young, Hal’s strong belief that he would become a millionaire with just one right business plan, or how their neighbors, schoolmate, bosses, ex-lovers truly saw them. Sadly the 2 main characters in the book where not the most interesting or the ones I wanted to learn more about. I think I will pass on anything more from this author and say we agree to disagree.
April 24, 2009
This gets 3.5 stars. It wasn't bad, but it just completely lacked structure. It meanders along episodically for several hundred pages, not necessarily chronologically, but not with any meaningful pattern of switching between past, present, and future. It was too long for a book in which very little actually happens, and there were so many characters and digressions that took up hundreds of pages but barely figured into the story at all. The last chapter is kind of a cheap, tacked on Happy Ending that did not ring true. So, all in all, disappointing. And yet this was a bestseller. Can someone explain that?
December 4, 2011
I picked up this book from the library where I work. Simpson's prose is lovely but the book ended up feeling like a slog to get through. There's no real plot, and one of the main characters is so infuriating I just got sick of reading about her doing the same annoying, narcissistic things over and over again. I much preferred the few, short sections from the older women's perspective that evoked the Midwest of the past where small towns were actually thriving and people appreciated the quiet landscape where they lived.
March 10, 2011
This book really hit home. I really felt with Ann and Adele. Even though it took me forever to read I really enjoyed it. The characters were complex and interesting. I almost cried at the end.
September 17, 2010
Much better book than a movie. The book is neither oversentimental nor hostile. Poignant moments are not over done and give the book a greater impact that stays with you after reading.
December 4, 2016
As good as I remembered.
July 9, 2020
"Cracks on sidewalks, red lines of ants, uneven places, grass growing up around concrete, the worst thing is you are alone. You always know. When you can't even sink, you can't stop, you can't let yourself. The dream of stopping, the desire, is like a pill. There is no one to hold your dead weight, so you always come back to yourself and you have to move again, your right food and your left, the same" (104).
"It was stubbornness. My mother didn't want this to be our life. She'd do it a day at a time, she'd put up with it, but she wasn't going to plan for it. We didn't pay bills, we didn't buy groceries, we bounced checks. Accepting our duties might have meant we were stuck forever. We made it so we couldn't keep going the way we were; something had to happen. But the thing was, it never did" (440).
ANYWHERE BUT HERE riveted me. Simpson writes so observantly, inhabiting every woman narrator fully, in plainspoken American poetry.
Adele is the Blanche DuBois of the 80s, a clinically delusional dreamer living on Baskin Robins ice cream cones and bounced checks, hallucinating about the men who will save her and obsessed with feeling clean and young. Except, worse, Adele has a daughter she's deluding, too. Ann grows up in her mother's manipulative thrall, with brief respites in the arms of her grandmother, but she thankfully ages into clarity:"My mother's two passions were for difficult men and expensive clothing, neither obtained by the usual methods, but with a combination of luck, intuition, and calculated risk" (393).
The ways in which Adele fails herself and her family—her mother, sister, and daughter, all characters whose stories we get to hear from others' perspectives and their own (such a brilliant narrative structure!)—left my stomach in knots. Some scenes were so poignant I had to put the book down, like when young Ann—still very much under Adele's thumb—wants desperately to save and share with her a piece of cake she had eaten at school, but she holds onto it so tight that it crumbles in her pocket. Oof, it still gets me.
Made me think of my own grandmother, and the topsy-turvy way she raised my dad. If you're up for a mother-daughter book that will wreck you, can't recommend enough. Note: some of the characters are overtly racist, and I think Simpson could have done more to have the narrative address/resist that.
"It was stubbornness. My mother didn't want this to be our life. She'd do it a day at a time, she'd put up with it, but she wasn't going to plan for it. We didn't pay bills, we didn't buy groceries, we bounced checks. Accepting our duties might have meant we were stuck forever. We made it so we couldn't keep going the way we were; something had to happen. But the thing was, it never did" (440).
ANYWHERE BUT HERE riveted me. Simpson writes so observantly, inhabiting every woman narrator fully, in plainspoken American poetry.
Adele is the Blanche DuBois of the 80s, a clinically delusional dreamer living on Baskin Robins ice cream cones and bounced checks, hallucinating about the men who will save her and obsessed with feeling clean and young. Except, worse, Adele has a daughter she's deluding, too. Ann grows up in her mother's manipulative thrall, with brief respites in the arms of her grandmother, but she thankfully ages into clarity:"My mother's two passions were for difficult men and expensive clothing, neither obtained by the usual methods, but with a combination of luck, intuition, and calculated risk" (393).
The ways in which Adele fails herself and her family—her mother, sister, and daughter, all characters whose stories we get to hear from others' perspectives and their own (such a brilliant narrative structure!)—left my stomach in knots. Some scenes were so poignant I had to put the book down, like when young Ann—still very much under Adele's thumb—wants desperately to save and share with her a piece of cake she had eaten at school, but she holds onto it so tight that it crumbles in her pocket. Oof, it still gets me.
Made me think of my own grandmother, and the topsy-turvy way she raised my dad. If you're up for a mother-daughter book that will wreck you, can't recommend enough. Note: some of the characters are overtly racist, and I think Simpson could have done more to have the narrative address/resist that.
April 3, 2020
This book was big & long & messy & complex and I'm glad I stuck with it, despite occasional misgivings. I tend to forget that literature isn't meant to be easy or infallible, that good characters aren't necessarily good people, that portraits can be smudged and misleading and still be compelling. This book made my stomach hurt in a way I didn't know could be good. Adele was infuriating and heartbreaking, as was her daughter Ann. You learn to understand them even as they continue to mystify. Reading this book right after Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden & alongside Godshot by Chelsea Bieker produced some fascinating dialogue about mothers & daughters & the ways people hurt & harm & love & use each other. I'm not sure I loved this book but I'm really glad I read it.
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