How the hell did I not know this? Well, scratch that, you obviously can’t answer that question. But still!
Second to the last, excepting for the fact that I have no idea who Mona Simpson is.
Was I the last person to learn that Mona Simpson isn’t just an animated character voiced by Glenn Close?
Nope…saw the thread title and was really, REALLY confused.
Well whaddaya know, a literary light wasn’t as bright as I thought.
Still, at least now you know where the character on The Simpsons got her name (or if you don’t, you can Google it).
I didn’t know that, and I lived with Mona Simpson once.
(Well, we stayed at the same writer’s colony for a month in the late 1980s.)
Hey, I lived with her ex-husband once! O.K., I lived in the same dorm as him and had an enormous crush on him. He didn’t actually know I existed (he once fell asleep while I was talking to him).
Are we back to “Who the fuck is Mona Simpson?” or will I need to google her, which doesn’t seem worth the bother?
Well, there is that link in the OP.
Ok…who’s Mona Simpson??? Oh, :smack: I see this IS the million dollar question within this thread! 
For anyone else who hasn’t clicked the link, apparently she’s a successful novelist, and apparently Steve didn’t find out she even existed until he was in his 20s.
Or you could click the link - I’ll bet you click hundreds of links every day!
I suspect there’s an age gap here. Or a NYT Review of Books gap. Anyway, yes, she was a hot-shit novelist in the late 80s/early 90s, hot enough to be lionized by other writers and raised into the pantheon of the Vintage Contemporaries book series. Alas, alas…fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.
Now that Jobs has so much time on his hands, maybe he can appear as himself in a Simpsons episode with both Mona Simpsons.
Well, that explains it then. Late '80s I had just gotten married and we had our first child in '91. Too broke and busy to follow contempory novelists back then (and that *was *twenty years ago – I believe a goodly number of our fellow message board denizens were barely reading Dr. Seuss two decades ago).
No, I am the last, and since I don’t read much, it’s a big meh…
I didn’t know. Her short story “Lawns” is excellent.