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Anywhere But Here
by
Mona Simpson (Goodreads Author)
"Strangers always love my mother," Ann August tells us at the start of Anywhere But Here. "And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, ...more
Published
(first published 1986)
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I saw this movie like a million years ago and I keep forgetting to add this book to my queue, until there was a mention in EW a few weeks back because the author wrote a new book, so they mentioned her best selling old one, this title. I was greatly disappointed! I don't know why, it was totally different from the movie, which I have seen a million times and love. The core characters were the same and the story was sort of similar, but it is a total "based on" movie and not "adapt...more
I vacillated between two and three stars for this one - a lot of what I disliked were actually the book's strengths - but felt too negatively to go the extra star.
This book centers around a selfish, immature and heavily delusional mother who packs up her daughter and runs off to California to pursue the daughter's Hollywood career. Through a series of linked annecdotes and flashbacks the reader eventually pieces together all the ways this mother has let Ann down and in many ways created th...more
This book centers around a selfish, immature and heavily delusional mother who packs up her daughter and runs off to California to pursue the daughter's Hollywood career. Through a series of linked annecdotes and flashbacks the reader eventually pieces together all the ways this mother has let Ann down and in many ways created th...more
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I'm sort of undecided about this one. At first (and actually probably until about halfway through the book) I really liked it. I was ok with the meandering plot because I enjoyed her style of writing and her ability to make you empathize with the characters. I didn't mind reading the same event from different characters' perspectives. However, my enthusiasm dropped off after sticking with it and waiting for something monumental to happen. But I just finished the book, and here I am, still w...more
I finished this a few days ago. I like the shifts in voices and Adele's ambiguity. I like the jumps from Bay City to Beverly Hills and I especially like the scene's with Ann's father. I wish I read this before My Hollywood.
There's something about the book that feels apprehensive rather than relevatory. I think there's a sterility in here that makes me feel very distant from the protagonist. Even though I want to sympathize with Ann, I hold back and I can't quite figure out why. My deta...more
There's something about the book that feels apprehensive rather than relevatory. I think there's a sterility in here that makes me feel very distant from the protagonist. Even though I want to sympathize with Ann, I hold back and I can't quite figure out why. My deta...more
Great multi-generational physchological study of the female coming-of-age experience! Also, a STELLAR first novel by Steve Jobs' biological sister.
I enjoyed this a lot, I was surprised after when reading, that some of the other reviews were more negative. It was long at times and somewhat meandering, and I'm not sure how I'd explain the book to someone, but it was interesting. I definately know people like the mother, and they make me sad also. I wasn't sure what to make of the daughter, at times I really liked her and then other times did not. Similar to how I felt about the grandmother at times... The interfamily dynamics were interestin...more
A brilliantly drawn portrait of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship (along with tour-de-force sketches of their kin) that is both eccentric and eerily familiar. We can't believe such a selfish, smart, dysfunctional mother exists, yet still empathize and even recognize flashes of our own motives in her. We ache for the daughter and wonder how she will survive and keep bouncing back (and always again toward her mother!) This is one of those master novels that makes cinema-lovers like m...more
This book was wonderful! I love Simpson's writing style and the way the perspective bounced back and forth between several characters was great. The perspective of Ann was what I enjoyed most, and that was heavily featured, but the sprinkling-in of first-person narration from other characters was great to read. I really like that the last few pages were from the perspective of Adele, because she is the one whose head we as readers want to get inside of throughout the story, and finally we get to...more
This gets 3.5 stars. It wasn't bad, but it just completely lacked structure. It meanders along episodically for several hundred pages, not necessarily chronologically, but not with any meaningful pattern of switching between past, present, and future. It was too long for a book in which very little actually happens, and there were so many characters and digressions that took up hundreds of pages but barely figured into the story at all. The last chapter is kind of a cheap, tacked on Happy Ending...more
Neurotic mother Adele leaves the midwest & her husband with her daughter,Ann, to seek stardom for her. Ann starts as a believer & one who wants to be exactly like her mother. Various female members of the family tell the story, addressing it to Ann. Adele's single admirable trait: her capacity for wonder. Ann eventually goes off to college & for years avoids going home even to visit. The End: Adele: she is the reason I was born. The book was made into a movie with Susan Sarandon & Natalie...more
I picked up this book from the library where I work. Simpson's prose is lovely but the book ended up feeling like a slog to get through. There's no real plot, and one of the main characters is so infuriating I just got sick of reading about her doing the same annoying, narcissistic things over and over again. I much preferred the few, short sections from the older women's perspective that evoked the Midwest of the past where small towns were actually thriving and people appreciated the quiet ...more
Mona Simpson's debut novel is pretty much a memoir, which could be titled "This Girl's Life." It's a tale of a single mother (Adele) and her daughter (Ann) and the challenges they face over the years, first in Wisconsin where Adele's from and later in SoCal when Ann's a tween/teen and her mother has delusions of making her a child star.
Of interest to me, which I discovered only after starting this book, is that Simpson is married to Richard Appel, producer of The Simpsons,...more
Of interest to me, which I discovered only after starting this book, is that Simpson is married to Richard Appel, producer of The Simpsons,...more
"Strangers always love my mother," Ann August tells us at the start of Anywhere But Here. "And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, fair." Indeed, over the course of the dozen or so years chronicled in Mona Simpson's first novel, Ann and everyo...more
Daughter, Ann and mother, Adele August travel from Wisconsin to California to make Ann a television star. Leaving behind husbands and boyfriends, Adele deludes herself into thinking she can alter their utilitarian lives.
Ann's narration keeps me in her nervous, angry state of mind, but Adele is the star here. A most memorable character, Adele: charming and full of all types of deception. A great story of the love-hate complication of being mother and daughter.
Ann's narration keeps me in her nervous, angry state of mind, but Adele is the star here. A most memorable character, Adele: charming and full of all types of deception. A great story of the love-hate complication of being mother and daughter.
I recently reread this book and loved it. I think Simpson sets the stage for many of the disenchanted teenage girls who have since become so important in the cultural dialogue (I'm thinking about My So-Called Life and Daria, maybe even Buffy), or at least among Gen-Xers, and the mother Adele is a pitch-perfect description of someone sadly/hilariously on the brink of losing her sanity. I will never not love this book, sorry haters!
Ok, I get it. Adele is unreliable. No one has the same story, even about the same events. It's time to get ice cream and make more bad decisions.
Three fourths of the way in and I don't know what the plot is. I don't know what the characters need to resolve. I don't even know what they want.
I'll try Mona Simpson's later work and right now, this post-MFA funk, I may not be an ideal (or even decent) reader. Sorry, Mona. Let's just say it's not you and it's not me and move on...more
Three fourths of the way in and I don't know what the plot is. I don't know what the characters need to resolve. I don't even know what they want.
I'll try Mona Simpson's later work and right now, this post-MFA funk, I may not be an ideal (or even decent) reader. Sorry, Mona. Let's just say it's not you and it's not me and move on...more
Slow, boring and dull, this book disappoints. The last straw was when the daughter starts taking semi-pornographic photos of other children. I don't find this engaging or entertaining. It just gives me a bad feeling all over.
Nor did I find the mother to be a particularly engaging character.
I tried three times to read this book and finally gave up.
Nor did I find the mother to be a particularly engaging character.
I tried three times to read this book and finally gave up.
A long and intimate look at a mother-daughter relationship and some extended family members. The mother was a complex character - both abusive and loving. The crux of the story was Ann's struggle to become an adult while caught in her mother's delusional world. The book made me want to go out and get ice cream since Ann and her mother, Adele were always indulging themselves.
This book has two major strikes against it: the fact that it was later made into a movie starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman, and the fact that there is neither plot not conclusion. But I still loved the writing and the characterization of everyone except the mother character, who was clearly supposed to be this charming but shiftless Unique Person, and I had very little sympathy for her. But I loved a lot of the other voices in the book, especially the sections that were told from the...more
This was a good chronicle of the "American dream" in the eyes if a nutty mother and her daughter. This lengthy book follows the daughter from her experiences in early childhood to college years. It was ok. It kept me reading but it's nothing I got too excited about.
The last 100 pages or so were fragmented and seemed to just summarize in almost bulleted paragraphs what happened in the years the daughter was away... A but strange
The last 100 pages or so were fragmented and seemed to just summarize in almost bulleted paragraphs what happened in the years the daughter was away... A but strange
While I didn't always like the two main characters or some of the choices they made, I still enjoyed reading the book. The mother was completely over the top and it's a good thing children's services didn't catch on to her style of mothering, but she was definitely an interesting character.
I loved this book.
I think of it from time to time and if I can't find my copy I buy it again.
I love the pitch perfect chapters from different characters points of view.
It wasn't the story that gets me to come back to this book over and over.
It's the writing that inspires me.
I think of it from time to time and if I can't find my copy I buy it again.
I love the pitch perfect chapters from different characters points of view.
It wasn't the story that gets me to come back to this book over and over.
It's the writing that inspires me.
Some parts were touching but it felt a little like an epic family drama without a focus, and it felt like it took forever to get through. I did not want to still be reading it in 2011 so I forced myself to read the last 100 pages on New Year's eve day.
Folks looking for a plot driven novel won't like this one.
The beauty of this novel is in the quality of the writing and the depth of the characters.
The abrupt switching of narrators is grating but the writing is absorbing enough to overcome this.
The beauty of this novel is in the quality of the writing and the depth of the characters.
The abrupt switching of narrators is grating but the writing is absorbing enough to overcome this.
I just couldn't connect with any of the characters in this book. I felt actively repelled rather than engaged, despite some lovely language and interesting imagery. At the end of the day, I wanted more of a story.
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/1105...
I don't understand the reviews on the cover that said 'funny'. More tragic and disturbing. The different points of view was an interesting way to tell the story but Ann's story is really the most interesting one and Carol's narratives can be disruptive, even if they fill in the blanks. It seemed to complete peter out at the end but the final 3 or 4 pages of Adele's narrative blindsided me. She is a difficult character and I didn't find anythin...more
I don't understand the reviews on the cover that said 'funny'. More tragic and disturbing. The different points of view was an interesting way to tell the story but Ann's story is really the most interesting one and Carol's narratives can be disruptive, even if they fill in the blanks. It seemed to complete peter out at the end but the final 3 or 4 pages of Adele's narrative blindsided me. She is a difficult character and I didn't find anythin...more
Just couldn't do it. I tried I really tried. It was not badly written, just meandered on with no seeming point. By the 80th page I cheateed and read the end(which I really try not to do.) When I read the end and still didn't care, I gave up.
The author spends an inordinate amount of space on describing the dysfunction of the narrator's family, specifically her mother, only to deprive us of any kind of conclusion to their lives.
I hadn't known this was a book, I've seen the movie hundreds of times and thought it would be as good as the movie. Turns out this is one of those instances where the movie was a whole lot better.
Much better book than a movie. The book is neither oversentimental nor hostile. Poignant moments are not over done and give the book a greater impact that stays with you after reading.
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
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| anywhere but here | 1 | 2 | Nov 21, 2011 12:55am |
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 sch...more
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“And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, fair.”
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