Mona Simpson was born to an American mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, and a Syrian father, political science professor Abdulfattah John Jandali. She is the younger sister of Steve Jobs, co-founder and current CEO of Apple. Because Jobs was placed for adoption as a baby by their then-unmarried parents, she first met her sibling as an adult. She later took her stepfather's surname, Simpson. She attended the University of California at Berkeley.Having received her B.A. in English from Berkeley in 1979, she attended Columbia University where she received an M.F.A. She worked for Paris Review during this period. She currently lives in Santa Monica, California with her husband Richard Appel and their two children. Appel, a writer for The Simpsons, used his wife's name for Homer Simpson's mother, beginning with the episode "Mother Simpson".