My Hollywood - Hardcover

Simpson, Mona

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307273520 ISBN 13: 9780307273529

Publisher: Knopf, 2010

Synopsis

A wonderfully provocative and appealing novel, from the much-loved author of Anywhere But Here and A Regular Guy, her first in ten years. It tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.

Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage—once a genuine 50/50 arrangement—changes, with Paul working long hours and Claire left at home with a baby, William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for.

Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who is working in America to pay for her own children’s higher education back in the Philippines, becomes their nanny. Lola stabilizes the rocky household and soon other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and “Williamo” remains her own closely guarded secret.

In a novel at turns satirical and heartbreaking, where mothers’ modern ideas are given practical overhauls by nannies, we meet Lola’s vast network of fellow caregivers, each with her own story to tell. We see the upstairs competition for the best nanny and the downstairs competition for the best deal, and are forced to ask whether it is possible to buy love for our children and what that transaction costs us all.

We look into two contemporary marriages—one in America and one in the Philippines—and witness their endangerment, despite the best of intentions.

My Hollywood is a tender, witty, and resonant novel that provides the profound pleasures readers have come to expect from Mona Simpson, here writing at the height of her powers.

About this title

About the Author

Mona Simpson is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, and Off Keck Road, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize of the Chicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, recently, an Academy Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santa Monica, California.

Reviews

With the publication of novels like Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's The Nanny Diaries (2002) and Kathryn Stockett's The Help (**** Selection Jan/Feb 2010), there is no shortage of books about women and their domestic employees. Even so, Simpson's pragmatic and delightfully observant nanny Lola shines in this story of contemporary child rearing. Critics did find Claire, with her privileged lifestyle and chronic self-doubt, a slightly less compelling character. And, in stark contrast to all other critics, the Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer found the novel disorganized, repetitive, and filled with exasperating characters. While a few readers may not find My Hollywood to their liking, most should find it an entertaining and heartfelt addition to Simpson's body of work.

Novel by novel, Simpson takes fresh and disquieting approaches to fractured families. Her fifth book is a duet between Claire, a high-strung composer who has left New York for Hollywood to support her husband’s television ambitions, and Lola, a Filipina in her fifties who becomes their nanny, caring with sensitivity and love for their precocious, moody son. Claire is ambivalent about motherhood. Lola is putting her children through college while continuing to support their household in the Philippines, where she is of the same class as the Hollywood women who hire her to care for their children. Claire’s deepening loneliness as her workaholic husband becomes a stranger and her artistic struggle in a place she finds arid and alien are compelling, but compassionate, wise, and self-sacrificing Lola, with her mellifluous voice and wonderfully inventive English, rules. In her arresting portrayals of Lola and her nanny and housekeeper friends, Simpson explores a facet of American society rarely depicted with such insight and appreciation. As Lola and Claire tell their intertwined stories, Simpson subtly but powerfully traces the persistence of sexism and prejudice, the fear and injustice inherent in the predicaments of immigrants, and the complexity and essentiality of all domestic relationships. --Donna Seaman

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

“Come on comeon comeon comeon comeon. Come to Lola. I have something for you.” Because he is very angry.

Today it is the mother he was hitting. She has her hand over her eye and I dab ice, the way I do his boo-boos. She lets her face in my hands. Then I take him away. But Williamo, he is strong. I cannot so easily hold. And Lola told a lie. I do not have anything. So I make promises. “Some-a-day,” I whisper, “I will bring you home with me. And there we will make the ice candy.”

He lies still, not any longer fighting. His bones fall in a pattern, like the veins of a leaf.

“I will put you in my pocket and feed you one candy every day. You will be happy. Because the ocean at our place it is very blue. The sky higher than here. And the fruits that grow on trees, very sweet.” Jackfruit, durian, lanzones. Attis. Santol.

“In my pocket I will give you one lychee. You can bounce for a ball.”

“If you were a kangaroo you would have a pouch,” he grumbles, better now, slower the heart.

Through the window I see my employer. She looks like she has too much assigned to her; she cannot complete it all before she dies. She holds the ice and paces, talking long-distance to a woman who reads books about the raising of children. When my employer becomes upset she calls this friend. My employer has the American problem of guilt. But you should not be guilty to your children. It is for them that you are working! Then I remember that check for a thousand, long ago. I do not like to think that; it still opens a taste of confusion.

But Williamo, he is better now. Only the mouth smears. I promise him candy, not the ice candy, just candy we can buy here. “But-ah do not tell your mother.”

I call to her, “Excuse, we are going now.”

“Okay. Thanks, Lole.” My employer believes she cannot live without me. She is telling her friend who reads the books that he is better with me than with her. Lil will tell her that this is perfectly normal. My employer, she needs to be left alone. But that is not a quality for a mother. Children, they are dependent for their life. “Playdate,” my employer says. “I can’t even stand the word.”

“Do you have poo-poo?” I pull out the diaper. I am paid to smell that. But what she said to her friend is true. With me, Williamo is no problem.

My employer, she says when a baby comes home from the hospital, a Filipina should arrive with him. That, for her, would make a perfect world. “It’s the Asian thing,” I heard her say once. “They’re more gentle with kids than Hispanics.” She thinks it is all Filipinos. Maybe every single human being from Asia. I could introduce her to a few. Claire walks out carrying keys. With a child small small, it is like a ball and chain. You are never free. Not even sleeping. “Bye.” She slams her car door. An escape. She will stroll in the conservatory, thinking about old songs. Americans, for them the highest time is college: books in a bent arm, on the way to learning. Us, we go to school to get the degree.

I push Williamo in the stroller and he sits. That is the good of fighting; it makes them very tired. The sun is solid, like many small weights on our arms. This neighborhood is ours during the daytime. You do not observe mothers, only in and out of cars, carrying shopping bags. In my place, I was, at one time, one of these married ladies. Now when I watch from afar, it looks like a lot of work.

I put coconut oil and zinc powder on the nose because Williamo he is very white. My albino grandson. All the while, I talk to him. Ruth told me, You have always to talk, even a baby, it is important. And I talk to him, more than my own, because my kids I had one after the other, five in nine years. In the class of two thousand and ten, at Harvard University there will be two Santa Monica boys saying to cooks in the cafeteria, Excuse, where is my adobo? Lola by then will be swaying in a hammock, back in the Philippines.

“What for?” He is young. He does not yet understand the importance of rest.

When we pass the play store, I turn in and ask, “Where is Lola from?”

He points on the globe.

“Very good.”

Outside again, in the distance we see children, past tall trees, old in the glittering air. But Williamo says he does not want to play, not now, so we roll under the eucalyptus once upon a time from Australia until the eyes close. I knew from Ruth to work for a working mother. The women who stay home want their babies tucked in cribs for naps, so they can tiptoe in and peek. But Williamo, he can sleep on grass. Today he will nap in his stroller.

I told my employer already: When they go to Europe to celebrate their tenth anniversary, I will take Williamo to the Philippines. We are saving for the tickets. I cannot save much because every month I send home eighteen hundred. My kids, they are a little jealous, especially Dante and Lisa, because they have their own. And it is true. I am closer to Williamo than I am to my grandchildren. Because I see Williamo every day.

Tomorrow for the playclub, I will make tapioca. Williamo likes the big kind we have to soak overnight, so I walk to the grocery. For a long time, I worried this job. Then one day I was not trying anymore. Someone touches my arm in the aisle. “Hola!” she says. “Cómo estás?”

Here, they think I speak Spanish. “Hi,” I say.

“I know you. You’re the babysitter of the boy who says To be or not to be.”

I point to the stroller. Thumb in his mouth, eyes closed. “Not to be,” I say. My employer made an orchestra from a play by William Shakespeare. That is why Williamo. At the end of his speech, after ’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d, I told him, Then you bow. And he will bow.

“I’m Beth, Brookie and Kate’s mom,” she says. “You’re Lola, right?”

“I know Esperanza,” I say. Esperanza, she is the only one in the playclub not Filipina.

The woman stands writing on a small card. She puts the name and address and she scribbles Call me! We need help Saturday nights!

But I am not tempted. Esperanza says her employer leaves her exercise clothes, underwear and all, in damp lumps on the floor. The next time Beth Martin wants to see those things they will be clean and folded in her drawer.

I am a little popular. With my new weekend salary, I send home an extra hundred every week. In America, I am on the way up.

I push the stroller to the place of Mai-ling, where babysitters sit at a picnic table eating her fresh lumpia, light and porous, and savory adobo, with bay leaves planted by the landscaper. Mai-ling stands ironing, using an extension. Here, the man and the boy go out every day; it is only babysitters and children small small and sometimes a half-dressed woman upstairs, cataloging the possessions. Afternoons, they are not like this in Manila, even in the gated residential districts of Makati where outside you see only workers in uniform. In tea shops mothers gather with their children in an after-school world. Williamo still sleeps, so I park him facing the wall.

“My employers, they change when they move to the big house,” Lita says. “They really change.”

“For your salary, let them change!” Her employer is Alice, the doctor. The husband, he wakes up in the middle of the night when the stock market opens in New York. And Lita gets one hundred dollars a day. They live in a Beverly Hills mansion.

We compare jobs, the way women compare husbands. The house of my employer it is the smallest. But one day I will bring the disc with her music and play that little melody I heard. This is the mother of Williamo, I will tell them. Usually, you would trade a part of what you have, but not all. When I think of my husband Bong Bong, I see him bent over his table, drawing the lines of a white chrysanthemum, a tropical Christmas flower. I close a fist in my pocket. “But-ah, your employers, they are good.” I am always the one telling babysitters to stay. Because too much change, it is bad for children. And the two of Lita are well behaved, because they are Asian. Chinese, adopted.

“They don’t think I will leave but lot of people, they are looking Filipinas.”

“Rich people,” Vicky says.

“We are status symbols. Like a BMW.” I can usually make babysitters laugh.

“No, you know know what Alice told me?” Lita whispers. “In the hospital they have a joke, what does ‘yes’ mean in Tagalog? ‘Yes’ it means, ‘fuck you.’ ”

“Yes,” Vicky repeats, loud. “Fuck you.”

“Shhh,” I say. Williamo is a myna bird. Sure enough, the head pops up.

“What?” He is very advanced. “What?” He tugs my sleeve.

Vicky, she does not think! The employer here is usually in the house, even when we cannot see her. Some unmarried women, you wonder why. But not Vicky. It is a face I have seen before on retardeds, the profile a crescent, the jaw and forehead more out. Vicky thinks only about her meals and money. In our place, we would not know each other. Mai-ling I would never meet either, unless she worked in my house. A peasant, ethnic Chinese, she has no education. Only Lita lived in my social class, in the suburb next to mine.

“Alice will be very surprise.” One or two times a year Lita says she is leaving.

Lita wears the clothes of a wife, the fingernails filed oval, polished pink like the inside of a shell. Twelve years ago, she came here to work and married an American. Not in the church but in a courthouse, her real husband still alive in the ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307273520
• ISBN 13: 9780307273529
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384