Meet Lola, a Filipina nanny working in California to send her daughter back in the Philippines to medical school, while her husband waits patiently at home, an executive for Hallmark. Ruth, an immigrant as well, is Lola’s “teacher of America” and runs a placement service for nannies.

“Three women one baby. Usually it is the other way around,” Lola remarks to her nanny friend, though she knows well the challenge from raising her own children in a close knit community of the Philippines.

Lola works for Claire, a middle-aged mother of William and wife to Paul who is an aspiring comedic writer with one toe in Hollywood’s door. While Paul works many long hours, Lola is hired to help Claire, a composer who reflects deeply on her role as a mother and artist: “Music was all or nothing. Art gave no B pluses, no credit for trying. If I couldn’t make that, I’d be better off tending my son or working in a hospital. I still didn’t know if I could make that. And I was almost forty.”

While the relationships Mona Simpson explores are reminiscent of The Help in the complexity of paying someone to basically care and love for a child while parents pursue dreams closer to their own terms, one of the biggest differences is that the female role has been liberated from the stay-at-home fragile female with mothers like Claire pursuing professional careers. Claire is very aware of the choice she has made but still does not feel the freedom to seriously continue her creative work as a composer. At one point she admits to her husband, “I wanted to be a father.”

The chapters alternate between Lola and Claire. These two women and the choices they make stay with the reader long after finishing the book.

Though we may have long forgotten the freedom our first generation immigrant ancestors felt, you will think about the abundance of choice we have in the United States and how it must feel for a new immigrant like Lola. You will think about the choices your mother made, the choices you have made with your own children. I don’t have children but the novel still affected me deeply as women seem driven by an invisible force to fulfill as many roles as possible, making them central to the intricate relationships of the family.

As Lola explained the Filipino language to a child very dear to her: “Lola is grandma. Yaya for nanny. Ate, older sister . . . Tita for auntie . . . Inday, little sister . . . They are names but they are not exactly names. They are positions . . . Then we say the rosary.”

Mona Simpson will be at Lemuria for a signing (5:00) and reading (5:30) on Wednesday, September 15th.

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