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In the early 1990s, Helen Simonson was a stay-at-home mother in Brooklyn, taking care of two young boys and squeezing in an hour or two here and there to attend beginner fiction classes at the 92nd Street Y. Today, Ms. Simonson’s boys are 14 and 16 years old, and their mother is on the fast track to literary success—her first novel, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” has been picked up by Random House as part of an impressive six-figure deal.
The novel, an against-all-odds story of love between a retired British Army major and a British-Pakistani store clerk, will be published by Susan Kamil, editor-in-chief of Little Random, next year. It will be printed in English in the United States, Great Britain and Australia, and translated into French, German, Italian and Portuguese.
“It’s very overwhelming,” Ms. Simonson said in an interview last week. “I know that I’m extremely lucky. I don’t know what forces of the universe convened to allow this.”
“For a couple of months, I literally had to keep pinching myself,” she added. “I would wake up in the mornings and think it must have been a dream.”
Not bad for a former advertising executive, who admitted she had “no idea” what she was doing when she began the novel.
“I wasn’t really sure how to write a novel,” she said with a laugh. “I was just kind of stumbling along.”
A part-time resident of Westhampton Beach, Ms. Simonson penned “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” as her creative thesis for Stony Brook Southampton’s MFA program. She finished the manuscript last November, and graduated from the MFA program last December.
The book was picked up in April of this year, and will be published in March 2010. The first chapter has already been published in The Southampton Review, the MFA program’s literary magazine.
A two-time attendee of Stony Brook Southampton’s Summer Writers Conference, Ms. Simonson read from the novel at the conference this month in a presentation with Elena Gorokhova, another alumna of the Writers Conference, whose memoir, “A Mountain of Crumbs,” is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.
After moving recently to Washington, D.C. with her husband and sons, Ms. Simonson is already at work at a second novel. Though she wouldn’t divulge details of her next book, she said she is excited to be writing again.
“Now that I’m done with the first novel, I’ve realized what my voice is,” she explained. “I have a better feeling of how I’m writing, and what works.”
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