Author Mona Simpson reads from her latest release, Commitment, a masterful novel about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state mental hospital in the 1970s. The reading is followed by a discussion between Simpson and chef, author, and radio host Evan Kleiman.

Mona Simpson is the best-selling author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook. Commitment, her most recent work, hit shelves March 21, 2023. Off Keck Road was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is on the faculty at UCLA. In 2020, she was named publisher of The Paris Review.