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"  Writers, John Updike once wrote, are like snails, &amp;quot;leav[ing] behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves.&amp;quot; As with Updike and Philip Roth, readers of Mona Simpson&amp;#039;s powerful, nakedly autobiographical novels can pick up the thread of her life without ever speaking a word to her. And what a life! Simpson&amp;#039;s story is the stuff of myth: abandoned by her father at age five, dragged across the country by her charming yet unbalanced single mother at 13, and\u2014in a twist out of a Victorian novel\u2014reunited in her midtwenties with her long-lost elder brother, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, whom her parents had given up for adoption as an infant. With alchemical ease, Simpson has whipped this rich material into dazzling fiction. Her first book, Anywhere But Here, fictionalized Simpson&amp;#039;s cross-country road trip with her mom. Made into a movie starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman, the book dissected the mother-daughter relationship with brutal clarity: &amp;quot;[E]ven if you hate her, can&amp;#039;t stand her, even if she&amp;#039;s ruining her life, there&amp;#039;s something about her, some romance, some power. She&amp;#039;s absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you&amp;#039;ll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, fair.&amp;quot; Related: Pages From Mona Simpson&amp;#039;s Casebook Subsequent novels also limn her life: her ennui-filled Wisconsin childhood (Off Keck Road); her poignant quest to track down her mysterious half-Syrian father, Abdulfattah &amp;quot;John&amp;quot; Jandali (The Lost Father); and her struggle to further her career while caring for her young son and fending off conformist supermoms who attend two-day gingerbread workshops (My Hollywood). In A Regular Guy, a fictional portrait of a shaggy-haired tech entrepreneur, she even served up her own brother. Jobs admitted Simpson had nailed him\u2014or at least a part of him: &amp;quot;About 25 percent of it is totally me, right down to the mannerisms,&amp;quot; he told a reporter in 1997. &amp;quot;And I&amp;#039;m certainly not telling you which 25 percent.&amp;quot; Related: Susan Minot&amp;#039;s Torrid World of Individual Desire In her strange and mesmerizing sixth novel, Casebook, Simpson continues her journey into the dark heart of the American family. Miles Adler-Rich is a stout, sensitive preteen who plays chess, collects comic books, and takes perverse pleasure in throwing out his organic Whole Foods lunches and loading up on Mexi-Crisps and soda. But Miles is also a child spy. Desperate to glean information about whether he&amp;#039;ll be allowed to watch Survivor, he taps the family phone line and lurks in the basement crawl space to eavesdrop on his mother, soulful mathematician Irene Adler. After his parents divorce, diverging like the geometric fractals that fascinate Irene, the spying takes a darker turn. Miles grows obsessed with Irene&amp;#039;s boyfriend, Eli, a Lyle Lovett look-alike who favors Converse low-tops and stray cats. Eli dotes on Irene and becomes a father figure to Miles; but it turns out he&amp;#039;s not what he seems, and Simpson evokes Miles&amp;#039; disillusionment with aching precision. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d read Anne Frank&amp;#039;s diary and both volumes of Maus,&amp;quot; says Miles, the novel&amp;#039;s narrator and moral arbiter. &amp;quot;But until yesterday, I didn&amp;#039;t really believe that a person I knew could be bad.&amp;quot; Over lunch at a Santa Monica vegan restaurant, Simpson explains the genesis of Casebook. &amp;quot;An editor once told me that my work lacked a sense of vibrant, romantic hope,&amp;quot; she says in her low, husky voice. &amp;quot;So I set out to fix that. Casebook is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.&amp;quot; The love story, she said, had to be filtered through a child&amp;#039;s perspective. &amp;quot;We have all these cultural assumptions about love,&amp;quot; she says, spearing a forkful of Caesar salad. &amp;quot;People get hurt, and we say, &amp;#039;Oh, it&amp;#039;s no one&amp;#039;s fault.&amp;#039; I wanted someone young enough and uncool enough to emit a giant roar of wah when he feels pain and betrayal. So that was my way of trying to go about it.&amp;quot; She pauses, then adds: &amp;quot;There are things we learn from Miles that we couldn&amp;#039;t know from the lovers themselves. In my life, I&amp;#039;ve been the person watching lovers more often than I&amp;#039;ve been one of the lovers myself. Does everyone feel that way? That we watch love? That we aren&amp;#039;t usually the lovers ourselves? That&amp;#039;s why it&amp;#039;s such a momentous thing when it&amp;#039;s your turn.&amp;quot; At 56, Simpson is slim, attractive, and petite. She wears a blindingly white blouse and side-button trousers; her trademark copper-colored hair has been cut into a long, symmetrical bob. A few braided bracelets dangle from her small wrist. A tenured English professor at UCLA, she looks like someone who could run six miles a day while listening to conversational French-language tapes (both of which, in fact, she does). Casebook, while not overtly autobiographical, is flecked with elements from Simpson&amp;#039;s life. Like beleaguered Irene, Simpson has a penchant for organic food. And, also like Irene, she is newly divorced (from television writer Richard Appel), lives in Santa Monica, and sends her kids to a progressive private school with stringent social-justice requirements and a 1970s-holdover sensibility. But Simpson, who is unfailingly polite and courteous, is careful to deny any essential link between her life and her novels. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that&amp;#039;s not life,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;To paraphrase E. M. Forster, \u2028a life is too baggy, and there are too many aunts. At the very least, you have to reduce enormously. And, much more than that, one wants to imagine and shape.&amp;quot; Simpson smiles. &amp;quot;I use life when it&amp;#039;s better than what I can make up.&amp;quot; There is one part of her life that is off-limits. During our interview, she makes it clear that she doesn&amp;#039;t want to talk about her brother. &amp;quot;I loved him very much, and I miss him,&amp;quot; she says, before changing the subject. Later, in a follow-up e-mail, she clarifies that she considers questions about him to be out of bounds: &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s nothing in this book that relates to him in any way.&amp;quot; (Perhaps\u2014although Steve Jobs fans will note that the young Jobs was, according to his authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, a geeky child spy who wired his house with microphones and built a control room in his closet so that he could listen in on his parents&amp;#039; conversations.) I&amp;#039;d assumed Simpson&amp;#039;s reticence was due to the fact that her feelings about her brother were deep and elemental, in the realm of what Janet Malcolm has called &amp;quot;crabmeat&amp;quot;\u2014&amp;quot;the fragile essence of a person&amp;#039;s being, which the journalist makes away with and turns into some horrid mess of his own while the subject sleeps.&amp;quot; But those close to Simpson say she&amp;#039;s just sick of talking about it. &amp;quot;She has been hounded,&amp;quot; says a friend. &amp;quot;So many people want to be close to her because of him. It&amp;#039;s become a massive ordeal. She wants to be known for herself and liked for herself and approached for herself.&amp;quot; Prior to Jobs&amp;#039; death, the connection between the two was an odd and beguiling fact, bandied about in literary circles but not widely known. But Simpson&amp;#039;s gorgeous, poetic eulogy for her brother, delivered at Stanford Memorial Church on October 16, 2011, and reprinted in The New York Times, seems to have vaulted their relationship into the public consciousness. Simpson portrayed Jobs as a family man, a warm-blooded romantic who doted on his wife and children. He &amp;quot;treasured happiness,&amp;quot; Simpson declared. &amp;quot;He cultivated whimsy.&amp;quot; She contrasted her loving relationship with Jobs with her estrangement from their father: &amp;quot;Even as a feminist, my whole life I&amp;#039;d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I&amp;#039;d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.&amp;quot; It was a surprising tribute to a man who achieved his apotheosis through a reputation as a feared, if brilliant, autocrat. The piece was picked up widely: Roger Ebert called it &amp;quot;beautiful and heartbreaking&amp;quot;; Justin Bieber&amp;#039;s manager, Scooter Braun, declared it a must-read. The spotlight on her relationship with Jobs &amp;quot;did not affect [Simpson] and [Jobs] in equivalent ways,&amp;quot; a friend notes. For the tech titan, a long-lost novelist sister is a footnote in his mythic life story, a charming objet d&amp;#039;art, like the English and Chinese tea roses he cultivated. For Simpson, however, the Jobs meme is a distraction with the potential to overshadow her own literary reputation, which was burnished in gold even before anything was known about her family. On Amazon and Goodreads, Simpson&amp;#039;s novels are often reduced to fodder for Jobs groupies, who haunt message boards and comment threads, strip-mining her work for specks of insight about the Great Man. &amp;quot;Can you imagine what would have happened to Steve if Adele had raised him?&amp;quot; muses one Amazon reviewer, referring to the beautiful, feather-headed mother in Anywhere But Here. &amp;quot;Luckily Steve was adopted by a couple who put his needs first.&amp;quot; Simpson, for her part, is already moving forward. Her new novel seems calculated to remind readers why they fell in love with her in the first place. A compassionate rendering of teen angst in the postprivacy era, Casebook succeeds not only as a bildungsroman but also as a social comedy of divorce. She evokes the messy interior lives of splintered families with her usual Chekhovian blend of pessimism and humor. For months after his parents split, Miles recalls, &amp;quot;I kept wondering when the real horror would begin. In the middle of the night, I&amp;#039;d jolt and think, Here it is. But most days, it was as if we&amp;#039;d gotten another life but an okay one.&amp;quot; For a sad story, Casebook has a jazzy, playfully noir feel; Miles refers to his mother as &amp;quot;The Mims&amp;quot;; his younger twin sisters are &amp;quot;The Boops.&amp;quot; And Simpson gets off some great one-liners: &amp;quot;My dad made a point of not spoiling us. And except when it was convenient for him, he really didn&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mona&amp;#039;s in a happy place,&amp;quot; says one of her close friends, the novelist Michelle Huneven. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s got her life running well. The divorce is behind her. She&amp;#039;s just in full bloom. My Hollywood reflected on all the issues she struggled with when her children were young. Now she&amp;#039;s coming into this glorious adulthood. She&amp;#039;s at the point where she can have a little fun with her talents. And this book reflects that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The tincture of life most rarely found in art is happiness,&amp;quot; Simpson wrote in a 2011 essay for the literary site The Millions. &amp;quot;And arguably, the greatest happiness is love. We perpetually crave love stories and find that craving rarely satisfied.&amp;quot; A cautionary tale of a mother&amp;#039;s turbulent relationship with a possible sociopath, Casebook may seem unlikely to sate the longing. But Simpson sees the novel as a kind of postmodern What Maisie Knew, a family romance for the coparenting era. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve changed the way we live, and that has ripples in our fiction,&amp;quot; Simpson says. &amp;quot;The happy-ending fairy tale is just not as convincing anymore. Now the reality of marriage is more complex.&amp;quot; Simpson sips her Perrier, looking pensive. &amp;quot;We all know that divorce is sometimes unavoidable. But still, for ourselves, and for our children, we don&amp;#039;t want divorce. We want Jane Austen love. And somewhere in that disparity between what we wish for and what we can&amp;#039;t avoid, that&amp;#039;s a good place for fiction.&amp;quot; Simpson leans forward and, for a moment, looks as if she&amp;#039;s going to say something more, but doesn&amp;#039;t. Then she stands up and takes her handbag off the back of the chair. Her 14-year-old daughter, Grace, has texted her. She needs to be picked up. The interview is over. &amp;quot;Did I give you enough?&amp;quot; she asks. Apologetically, she flashes a smile, a slow, deep smile that briefly crinkles her eyes and takes over her whole face. It brings to mind Irene Adler&amp;#039;s elegiac smile on the last page of Casebook: &amp;quot;She gave you her face smiling for what seemed stopped time, it must have been two or three slow minutes. You wouldn&amp;#039;t forget. And that had an ending too, a soft ending that was an apology for leaving. A regret for the \u2028inevitable.&amp;quot; This article appeared in the May 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a14385/mona-simpson-profile/>