Erika J. Simpson, author of the memoir This Is Your Mother, is a recent transplant to Denver after spending her life in the South. She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky and received the 2021 MFA Award in Nonfiction. Her essay “If You Ever Find Yourself” was published in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and featured in Best American Essays 2022.
Her memoir is a powerful reckoning with legacy, loss, and the shifting terrain between mother and daughter. Through scripture-steeped memories and raw reflections, Erika Simpson traces her mother’s mythic resilience and the moment it gave way to mortality. In peeling back the layers of her mother’s story, she uncovers her own.
We asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire so readers could get to know her, and the books that shaped her life, better.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
A Nickelodeon book, Are You Afraid of the Dark?: The Tale of the Nightly Neighbors. The cover glowed in the dark and I’d read it after bedtime with a Allen Strange Burger King toy that glowed. Then A Series of Unfortunate Events, which my sister bought one by one for me and wrote my name inside in her tiny handwriting, and read to me about the miserable orphans before bed.
What book helped you through puberty?
Lurlene McDaniel books were my jam. As a child growing up with a sick mother, my internal stakes were always higher than the other kids around me. In McDaniel’s books, the kids were always dying of cancer! I loved this! Six Months to Live, Too Young To Die. I could gobble up a whole book while sitting at a table in the tea shop at the mall during one of my sister’s shifts, desperate to see if the girl will get her first kiss before she dies. Those are stakes!
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
Honestly, I don’t want to assign the teenagers a book, because the minute you suggest the best book you’ve ever read that will shape them as humans, it feels like homework and they might resist. I would simply suggest reading whatever grabs you. As a teenager I hunted for X-Files media-tie novels at the public library, stayed up all night reading The Time Traveler’s Wife and crying, and got morally conflicted in the City of Bones fantasy books. Hey. Find a world you love and sink into it!
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I just finished Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler so we have to start there. I think I’m Earthseed now.
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones will have you so conflicted morally…
Heavy by Keise Laymon really shaped my understanding of memoir creation.
So maybe a class on like, Writing Truth: Being Painfully Honest on Paper in Fiction and Nonfiction.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
While I was actively working on my memoir, I couldn’t read memoir because I didn’t want to copy the way they were telling their unique story or convince myself that I had to write in a certain established format.
Reading romance novels helped a lot. Fiction that was lighthearted and fun to escape the weight of revisiting my darkest days every morning. Not to keep mentioning my sister, but she put me on Alyssa Cole’s Reluctant Royals series and she reread them while I read for the first time. It was so freeing to giggle over a book boyfriend and have an adventure in a made-up country. It kept the shadows out of my brain, and allowed me to think in different ways, and remember to have fun in my own writing.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I’m currently reading Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler (so accurate it hurts), Bride by Ali Hazelwood, and nibbling on Simulcron-3 by Daniel Galouye