"The story of a family whose single mom, fighting mental illness, slowly becomes unable to raise her family, told from the perspective of each of the three children. As the novel opens, a mother drives her eldest son Walter from their home in Los Angeles to the University of California at Berkeley. It will be her last fully responsible act before breaking down completely and being committed to a mental hospital, leaving her children behind. Holding tight to his ambitions to become an architect, Walter must cope with the sudden loss of his family and all financial support. With the help of a family friend, his younger sister and brother, still at home, barely manage to escape social services and foster care, but they must fend for themselves as they try to finish school and begin searching for their own careers. We hear each of them tell their own story as they witness the slow disappearance of their beloved mother into mental illness while they struggle to achieve the life she envisioned for them and to keep the family intact"--

MONA SIMPSON is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook. She has received a Whiting Writer’s award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, an NEA fellowship, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace Prize, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Mary McCarthy Prize. Off Keck Road was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the publisher of The Paris Review, where she worked as an editor in her twenties. She lives in Santa Monica, California. She’s on the faculty at UCLA, where she often teaches Middlemarch.