Diane Simmons
Click on covers for links to books
Now Available Audible.com
AUDIO BOOK:
The Courtship of Eva Eldridge:
A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage Mad Fifties
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"The Courtship of Eva Eldridge is the kind of audiobook that stays with you long after it’s over. Diane Simmons takes a real-life story and turns it into an immersive journey through the 1950s – a time when marriage was seen as the be-all and end-all for women. Eva Eldridge’s life, full of love, betrayal, and heartbreak, reflects the weight of those expectations in a society obsessed with the ideal of marriage. Simmons’ writing stands out because she effortlessly draws you into Eva’s personal drama while also making you think about the bigger societal issues at play.
Kimberly Conwell’s narration is great! You feel like you’re walking alongside Eva, experiencing her highs and lows. Conwell doesn’t just tell Eva’s story, she brings out the emotion in every moment without overplaying it, which makes the whole experience feel so much more intimate and real. Her voice carries both the vulnerability and strength in Eva’s character, and that balance really resonated with me. It’s the kind of performance that makes you forget you’re listening to an audiobook – you’re just living the story.
One of the things I appreciated most about The Courtship of Eva Eldridge is how Simmons uses Eva’s life to touch on broader themes that still feel relevant today. You can sense the pressure on Eva to conform to what society expected of her, and the consequences of stepping outside those lines. Diane Simmons handles this with so much empathy, never casting judgment on Eva or the women of her time, but instead giving us a nuanced look at the impossible choices they faced.
The audiobook format really elevates the whole experience. Kimberly Conwell’s narration brings depth to the historical context, making it easier to connect with Eva’s personal struggles while also understanding the larger societal pressures.
If you enjoy stories that blend personal drama with historical insight, The Courtship of Eva Eldridge is must-listen. It’s a deeply human story about a woman trying to find her way in a world that expected her to fit a mold. It left me thinking about how far we’ve come, and how stories like Eva’s still resonate today.​
~ Victor Dima, The Audiobook Blog
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"In The Courtship of Eva Eldridge, Diane Simmons traces one woman’s story through hundreds of wartime letters and papers, ultimately uncovering postwar America’s rampant bigamy and the women who overcame it."
~ The New Yorker
"When I saw the description for Diane Simmons’s new book—that she had relied on over 800 pieces of correspondence and ephemera to write her book about a woman married to a bigamist in the 1950s—I was immediately hooked. . . . But The Courtship of Eva Eldridge goes further. It also delves into our collective history, reveals and educates its reader. . . And Simmons does a masterful job of relating her thorough research without making us feel in the least like we’re sitting in a Sociology 101 lecture hall. She makes her case slyly, so that we don’t even notice we’re nodding along and going, 'Ohhhh, yes, of course!'"
~ Yi Shun Lai, Tahoma Literary Review
“The Courtship of Eva Eldridge is both a riveting narrative of detection and a moving story about individual lives caught up in the changing gender roles generated by World War II. Diane Simmons employs dogged research, smart analysis, existing scholarship, and lively prose to create a history that is hard to put down.”
~ Susan Hartmann, author, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s
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Dreams Like Thunder
New edition in March 2025 from Red Hen Press
Winner Oregon Book Award
“Direct yet subtle, Dreams Like Thunder, is really about leave-taking. Alberta is going to leave the land that has imprisoned her family. . . and be haunted for the rest of her life. . . by the legend that is shaping her even as she rejects it.”
~ The Los Angeles Times
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“Simmons has the measure of her setting . . . in this thoroughly enjoyable, unpretentious second novel.” ~ The New York Times
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“The young girl, the storyteller, is perfectly imagined. Our country’s West, the ranchers, the deliberately drowned Chinese, the struggling miners, the struggling farm are lightly drawn but the fierceness, the cruelty are there.” ~ Grace Paley, finalist Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, finalist National Book Award.
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“Dreams Like Thunder gives characters as willful, funny, and morally interesting as Flannery O’Connor’s. Simmons’ language is spare and because of its compression, wonderfully rich and powerful.” ~ Oregon Book Award Judges.
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“This wonderful short book is at once an affectionate and humorous look at a lonely, highly imaginative eleven year old's life and the richly rendered world of a high desert farm in Eastern Oregon. It is, in fact, so eastern that the nearest city is Boise, Idaho. There is haying with sounds and smells and black dust circles around the workers' eyes, and there is our girl Alberta's delight in her adult friends who do the haying. She especially loves her father, a World War II ace pilot and flying instructor, who works alongside the hired men men.
~ Meredith Sue Willis, author.
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Little America
Winner Ohio University Prize for Short Fiction
". . . a contemporary Western, reminiscent of stories by E.L.Doctorow, Richard Bausch, and Richard Ford." ~ Chris Fink. Editor. Beloit Fiction Review.
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". . .stories with a rich, earthy humor that miraculously manages to honor people for their self-awareness and struggle even as they are repeatedly. . . trapped in the failures and limitations of their lives." ~ Meredith Sue Willis, author of Out of the Mountains, Their Houses and other fiction.
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“Voice is the real achievement here, which you know from the first paragraph of the story: ‘It’s mostly drunk Indians where I’m working at the moment. Better than mostly white guys. Indians just drink. White guys, it’s got to be you look like somebody.’” ~Sam J Miller, Blogging Brilliant Stories.
Jamaica Kincaid
“Throughout her book, Simmons shows how Kincaid problematizes cultural identity. . . and declares Kincaid’s ‘central theme’ to be ‘the relationship of the powerful to the powerless’. . . . It is to Simmons’s credit that she gives us the first full-length study of Kincaid, pioneering work on a neglected author by an incisive critic.” ~ Valerie Lee Research in African Literatures.
The Narcissism of Empire
“Simmons purpose. . . is to reveal how psychological and negative self-perceptions in childhood led [five Victorian writers] to their particular depictions of nineteenth and early twentieth century imperialism. . a stimulating and thought-provoking thesis that provides many new insights into the authors under discussion.” ~Tess Cosslett The Victorian Review
Maxine Hong Kingston
“Simmons argues that Kingston is a writer with a mission to humanize those whose humanity is in danger of erasure by fear and violence, whether at the hands of Chinese or American society or both. . . . tread[ing] gracefully through the mantraps of Asian American critical debate and the crisscrossing minefields of postcolonial and multicultural theorizations.” ~ Judie Newman Journal of American Studies.
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