Steps

by Mona Simpson

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” SelectionThe acclaimed author gives us a mesmerizing story of a family built, not by blood, but by second and third marriages and the relationships children have to “step” fathers, mothers and siblings long after their own parents have left them behind.   When Julie, an actress in her forties, receives a phone call from her one-time stepfather’s newest family asking her to come to see him once more before he dies, she agrees to make the trip.An ebook short.

30 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 23, 2017

About the author

Mona 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...

Reviews

[Emilie Grand’Pierre · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always forget how much I Love Short Stories

It is wonderful how much life a brilliant author can fit in a short story. By zooming in on a specific scene, or specific character, the arc of growth that is achieved in a couple of pages underscores how much small moments in life can transform our perspective and habits. A narrative that is encompasses all the evil that can inhabit a family, Steps is a look into how tragedy can be overcome once acknowledged.

[Moon Captain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, she's a great writer, but I found myself only continuing to read this because I felt guilty for not wanting to continue reading, since the story was so, hmm, haunted I guess. Or was it? I dunno. I don't want to give spoilers because I don't know how to tag them. Never heard of this writer & I read this as part of a McSweeney's thing.