My Hollywood

Step into the glittering lives of Hollywood America, as scrubbed, wiped and polished by immigrant women. It's so refreshing that a book can be this poignant, satirical and heartbreaking at once. You might find yourself laughing at your own life as you read what the help says and thinks behind the backs of American housewives. You'll wonder at the intricate system of the modern household-where one mother pays another to give her children love. It illuminates the differences between American and immigrant mothers-until you realize how alike we are! The vivid accents and the vibrant voices of the children continue to ring in my ear. I loaned it to my mom and she took it to Mississippi with her and won't send it back. I'll be buying a copy of my own.

Simpson's massive gifts - for unflinching precision, for artful indirection and for the deft unfurling of imagery - are on vivid display in My Hollywood, a book that carries us down deep, into the darkness of two distinct worlds, and lights them up, finding all the comedy in the ways they are the same world, and all the tragedy in the unbridgeable distance between them. - Michael Chabon

A darkly beautiful atlas of the American promised land, and a definitive novel of modern domesticity. Brilliant, in short. - Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland

A hilarious and heartbreaking take on the real housewives of Southern California. - Marie Claire

...as always with Simpson's work, the insight and stylistic flair keep drawing you back. This novel nails

the post-Freudian fear that all children will return - hopefully not in the manner of Lionel Shriver's

Kevin - to lay the blame squarely at their parents' door. - The Independent

Simpson works her habitual magic, showing how love travels, ownerless and unbidden, among children who need adults, and adults who need children. - New York Times

My Hollywood excels in the richness of its characterization... - Time

Compelling and beautifully written. - The Bookseller