William “Bill” E. Simon, Jr. published his book entitled All My Love Always, Your Gampy in 2025. His collection of letters to his grandchildren took nine and a half months from the day we started the project to the day his books arrived. We asked Simon to reflect on what the publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his book with others.
1. What inspired you to write the book in the format you chose, when you chose to write it: 100 bound letters to your grandchildren that began seven months after the first child was born?
Bill Simon: The answer has two parts. First, I remembered that my own children were very young when my parents passed away. They didn’t have the experience of going through different situations with them. And at this point, 23 years later, my kids don’t remember much about my parents. I wanted to provide my grandkids (and my siblings) with thoughts on some of the experiences I’ve had in my life. The idea of writing something made sense, and it felt more urgent knowing that I was already older than my parents were when they died.
Second, my wife had asked me to write my memoirs and that seemed like a very large project. I thought that writing these letters might be a pathway in, kind of like an icebreaker. I found that it became a parallel path. I was working on my memoirs but felt like tackling an easier task first, something I would like. I enjoyed the letters because they were bite sized. I didn’t start out with the idea of writing 100. After a couple of months, I counted them up and realized that I had written 45, but I didn’t feel like I was “done.” I wanted the goal to be some fun, round number that would be enough, but not too much. As I went on, I began to realize that 100 was going to be it.
“I wanted to provide my grandkids (and my siblings) with thoughts on some of the experiences I’ve had in my life.”
2. Since your grandchildren won’t be able to appreciate your work for several years to come, whom else did you intend as readers?
Bill Simon: I have six siblings, a brother and five sisters. And the group of us has 28 kids altogether. At times while I was working on the book, they asked if they could see it. I told them that they absolutely could, but only after my own kids reviewed it and decided whether it was appropriate for other people to see. I’ve already shared it with a few very dear friends, because when you’ve been friends with somebody for 30, 40, 50 years, I think it’s fun to reveal something that they might not know about you, or maybe just to bear witness to life’s path.
3. In addition to photographs and paintings by your son, the book includes several original paintings of your own. How has this complementary art form helped you explore your life?
Bill Simon: My career focused on business, so I’m not one to do a lot of analyzing of emotions and that kind of thing. But writing, painting, and even teaching—I teach at UCLA and taught at Williams, my alma mater—help me to tap into another part of my brain. I’ve really enjoyed it. With painting and teaching, you try to identify with the audience. I’ll share some examples.
We feel very fortunate to live in Pacific Palisades, but we had fires in January that destroyed most of the town. We live on a beautiful street that I’ve gone up and down for 34 years, and I’ve made a charcoal drawing of what it looks like now. The tree in the foreground is one whose canopy extended over half the street, and the drawing shows what it’s been reduced to. It just looks naked, and the branches are very stiff. It was something to experience that type of loss and to deal with that type of grief. Charcoal obviously helps convey that. It carries with it an emotion of sadness.
Our house did not burn down to the ground, but we evacuated and are still living in a hotel. In that hotel are lots of people from our neighborhood and adjoining neighborhoods, and 65% or more of their properties have been completely destroyed. Many have lost memorabilia, things that really can’t be replaced. I have several photographs. One is of someone’s car—you can recognize it, but barely—and beside it is a very burned tree. Then in the background you see the figure of someone walking away with a roller suitcase. That says a lot. They’re in effect saying, “We’re leaving.” In that little suitcase is all they had left. These are environments of extreme destruction, and I’m drawing and painting these images. Different people will have different reactions. Some people will be mad. Some people will be sad. Some people will be spiritual about it—as in, “for everything there is a season.” There are a lot of emotions that people will feel, and that’s fine. I just took up painting a couple of years ago, and as I learned, I think I understood for the first time that you’re not painting something to tell somebody how to feel. You’re painting something to elicit an emotion.
4. While working on the project, and inviting your wife, Cindy, to contribute a letter of her own, what did you learn about yourself or your family along the way that surprised you or deepened your understanding of your lives together?
Bill Simon: I think my wife was more surprised than I was, because she saw a side to me that she hadn’t seen before. She was an artist before I was, and she’s done quite a bit of great work. I’ve always had an appreciation for my wife. We’re very close. We’ve been married for 38 years. She’s always encouraged me to be my best self. Sometimes she can be pretty critical, and I’ve had to adjust to that. But that’s okay; it actually does make me better. This book represented a fairly radical departure from other projects I’ve engaged in. I’ve written a couple of other books, but I’ve had important outside help on each of them. With those, my wife always said, “I’m happy to read your draft—if you wrote it.” And when she looked, she’d say, “It’s nice, but it isn’t really you.” On this project, I’d share with her some of the drafts and letters and paintings, but then she said, “I’m going to look at it when it’s done.” I think the idea that all of these pieces could come together as a book surprised her. I was with her when she started reading the finished product, and she was like, “This is really good.”
5. For the book’s dustjacket, you supplied paintings of the front of your home and the backyard, and Book Designer Nicole Miller developed a concept from there. How does the cover capture the essence of what you tried to convey with this book?
Bill Simon: The events that occurred with the fires have highlighted how important a home is, and, unfortunately, how temporary it can sometimes be. When I looked at the cover of the finished product I thought, “Thank God we picked paintings of our home.” Because, though it did not burn down, if I did a painting now it would be much different. The one on the front looks like a Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet episode. When I was growing up, these were TV shows that opened with pictures of the family home. The camera would zoom in, and they’d open the door and say, “Hi!” It’s funny, because my brother always said that our house reminded him of Leave It to Beaver because everything has its place. It’s not fancy, but it’s warm and it’s a home, not a house.
We’ve had our home for 27 years, and our kids basically grew up in it. I feel very fortunate to have been able to provide that. Not that I did it alone. Cindy really deserves a lion’s share of the credit in terms of actually creating the home. But we’ve been parents together in a family that’s basically been in the same place for 34 years, since we lived in another house in the same area for seven years. And if that’s one of life’s important things—raising children—then I think we did pretty well. Our church is nearby, so we’ve got these things that have been part of our lives for a long time, and they all made their way into the letters. Home, church, the path of life. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but I’ve got to think that we’ve gotten a few things right.
Liz Sonnenberg is staff genealogist for Modern Memoirs, Inc.
