Local Literary Event: Mona Simpson in conversation with Melissa Ginsburg for “Commitment” Friday, August 18th, 5:30 PM at Off Square Books

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE YEAR—a masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.

Please join Square Books as we welcome Mona Simpson in conversation with Melissa Ginsburg for Mona’s new novel Commitment. Friday, August 18th at 5:30 pm at Off Square Books.

About the Book

When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who maintains a wishful belief that her children can attain all the things she hasn’t, she’s worked hard to secure their future in caste-driven 1980s Los Angeles, gaining them illegal entry to an affluent public school. When she enters a state hospital, her closest friend tries to keep the children safe and their mother’s dreams for them alive.

At Berkeley, Walter discovers a passion for architecture just as he realizes his life as a student may need to end for lack of funds. Back home in LA, his sister, Lina, who works in an ice-cream parlor while her wealthy classmates are preparing for Ivy league schools, wages a high stakes gamble to go there with them. And Donny, the little brother everybody loves, begins to hide in plain sight, coding, gaming, and drifting towards a life on the beach, where he falls into an escalating relationship with drugs.

Moving from Berkeley and Los Angeles to New York and back again, this is a story about one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives, a crisis many know first-hand in their own families or in those of their neighbors. A resonant novel about family and duty and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, Commitment honors the spirit of fragile, imperfect mothers and the under-chronicled significance of friends, in determining the lives of our children left on their own. With Commitment, Mona Simpson, one of the foremost chroniclers of the American family in our time, has written her most important and unforgettable novel.

About the Author

MONA SIMPSON is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook. She has received a Whiting Writer’s award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, an NEA fellowship, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace Prize, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Mary McCarthy Prize. Off Keck Road was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the publisher of The Paris Review, where she worked as an editor in her twenties. She lives in Santa Monica, California. She’s on the faculty at UCLA, where she often teaches Middlemarch.

About the Host

Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost and most recently, Doll Apollo, which won the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award in poetry, and the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, West Branch, Fence, the Southwest Review, and other magazines. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi and serves as associate editor of the Tupelo Quarterly.