CANR

• All Grown Up Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2017

1. All grown up LCCN 2017288299 Type of material Book Personal name Attenberg, Jami, author. Main title All grown up / Jami Attenberg. Published/Produced Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. ©2017 Description 197 pages ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780544824249 (hardcover) 0544824245 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3601.T784 A79 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Literary Hub - http://lithub.com/jami-attenberg-on-literary-break-ups-credit-card-debt-and-epic-book-tours/

  Jami Attenberg on Literary Break Ups, Credit Card Debt and Epic Book Tours
  In Which the Author of All Grown Up is Indeed, Asked If She Is All Grown Up
  March 7, 2017 By Dylan Foley
  Share:
  Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  176
  Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
  More

  Ed. note: the following profile alludes to certain plot points from All Grown Up, so proceed with caution.
  In 2010, the novelist Jami Attenberg published her third book of fiction, The Melting Season, which had a woman on the lam from Nebraska to Las Vegas with a suitcase full of cash. The book received very good reviews, but did not sell well. She was dropped by her publisher.
  Attenberg took the literary break up like a punch in the gut. “I wasn’t sure if I could keep going as a writer,” said Attenberg in a telephone interview in Washington DC, where she was attending the AWP conference last month. “I thought, ‘Oh, man, I have to go get a real job.’ I was so confused because I thought writing was what I was supposed to be doing with my life.”
  A year later, Attenberg’s fortunes took a 180-degree turn. Her editor left the same publisher and sold her new publisher on Attenberg. Attenberg’s 2012 novel The Middlesteins, a crisp domestic drama of a family ripped apart by a mother’s eating disorder, was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, hit the Times bestseller list and went on sale in ten countries, being translated into German and Italian, among other languages. The book became Attenberg’s breakout novel, putting her prominently on the literary map.

  Now Attenberg is back with her fifth novel, the witty and dark All Grown Up, which introduces readers to Andrea Bern, a 39-year-old Brooklyn professional woman who wants neither husband nor baby, but is searching for a fierce connection with her friends and lovers.
  Maybe Andrea drinks too much for her own good and has uneven taste in men. She’s a failed art student in a boring, stable job she happens to do well. Andrea is working through some buried traumas from her past while at the same time failing to deal with the fact of her niece’s rare, inevitably fatal medical condition.
  “The very first chapter I wrote was ‘Indigo Gets Married,’” said Attenberg, as she prepares for a PBS interview related to AWP. “I don’t even know where Andrea came from at that moment. I wanted to write about a person who was watching a friend achieve all these adult grown-up milestones in her life and she was not achieving them. Andrea is not me, but myself and so many other people can identify with watching a friend do the things you are supposed to do.”
  “In a way, the Indigo cycle of chapters was easy to write,” said Attenberg. “It was ‘Here’s 20 things that are annoying about this.’ I then put the novel away because I didn’t want to do it at that time.”
  “I didn’t want to write this book, to deal with the subject matter,” she said, which also addresses sexual violence. “I sincerely had a sense of taking one for the team. There finally was a moment when I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’”
  “I made a list,” she said. “I want to talk about how young women view themselves. I want to talk about how older men treat young women. I want to write about when a friend has a baby and disappears. All these things were happening around me. I wrote this book so fast.”
  “I don’t feel this character exists elsewhere, or that these issues are discussed enough in fiction,” she said “In many books, female characters are forced to think about when they are going to find their romantic partners.”
  “Andrea lived in the physical landscape I had occupied for so long,” referring to the South Williamsburg neighborhood where the fictional Andrea Berg and Attenberg have both lived. “I had an idea of the annoyances and grievances that she had. I could see it all around me.”
  Attenberg published Instant Love, her first book of stories, in 2006 when she was 34. “My first book was about what love was for the women of New York back then,” she said. “I think the two books are connected. I wrote the new book when I was 44. I want to show what life is like out there now.”
  “It is the weirdest thing, for fiction is fiction, but I kept telling myself that I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted there to be a specific honesty to it. The characters are invented, but there are these important feelings and sentiments.”
  In the novel, Andrea goes through the men in her life. There is Matthew, the truly impoverished painter committed to his art. Then there is Barron, a shell-shocked divorced father of a little girl, groping his way around, trying to put his life together. Finally, there is Kevin, who is the closest thing to a soulmate for Andrea, but whose mother won’t let him bring home a white woman.
  “Andrea is jealous of Matthew, because he is committed to his art,” said Attenberg. He’s a pain in the ass, though, because he can never afford to pay for his own dinner. “I definitely identify with Matthew,” she said. “I’ve had conversations with myself, where I’ve said ‘Either I’m not going to write, have stability in my life and not be happy, or I am going to do this and accept what comes my way.’”
  “With Barron, I’ve never been in a 12-year relationship and gotten out of it,” said Attenberg. “I’ve known people who’ve done that and everything after feels huge, everything feels like the first time.”
  “These people fell in love, they felt they were all grown up, they were doing everything they were supposed to do,” she said. “Suddenly, it’s over. ‘Holy crap, I am completely adrift and I don’t know how to behave myself. I have to figure out how to be an adult in a different way.’”
  “All the men that Andrea has sexual interludes with—I don’t think I can use the word romance—they are all in different ways trying to figure out how to be grown ups, how to treat people and how to be in the world.”
  Andrea goes out for drinks with Nina, a 25-year-old coworker. Over stiff drinks, they bond over bad dates, creepy sexual behavior by men, rape and near-rape stories that happened to themselves and friends.
  “I’m on social media and I see what young women are readily revealing about themselves, that they might not have revealed 20 years ago,” she said.
  “The way that we talk about rape culture and that it exists wasn’t discussed 20 years ago,” said Attenberg. “It’s a positive step that people feel comfortable talking about the negative sexual things that happened to them.”
  But the burgeoning workplace friendship with Nina doesn’t last, particularly after a surprising revelation that has Andrea thinking to herself, “Every day, there is a little death waiting for me. All I have to do is wake up and walk out the front door.”
  Andrea’s yoga-teaching, gorgeous friend Indigo resurfaces when she has her baby. She is condescending about Andrea’s single status. “I was thinking of all these women who have those fancy tech jobs, who say ‘All I want to be is a yoga teacher,’” she said. “How do they afford it? Oh, you’re married to a super-rich dude!”
  “There’s no point in writing Indigo if I’m going to make fun of her,” said Attenberg. “A one-note character is not interesting to me.” After life doesn’t quite turn out like it should, Indigo tries to reconnect with Andrea, looking for sympathy.
  Andrea mockingly compares their lives: “Her life is architected, elegant and angular, a beauty to behold, and mine is a stew, a juicy, sloppy mess of ingredients and feelings and emotions… But have you tasted it? Have you tasted it. It’s delicious.”
  In a flashback, Andrea explores her jazzman father’s heroin addiction and its disruption of her family. At 13, she trails her father from the Upper West Side to Greenwich Village, where he scores and shoots up. She confronts her father’s junkie friend, defiantly saying, “I make my own rules.”
  “I think what Andrea means is ‘This doesn’t feel right for me, this situation doesn’t fit for me,’” said Attenberg. “Andrea is going to spend the rest of her life trying to make things fit, or to make herself fit in.”
  To say the least, the 17-year-old Andrea has a tumultuous upbringing, including one man’s inappropriate sexual attention at one of her mother’s “rent parties,” that veers into something worse.
  “The mother is high and sad, not able to protect her daughter,” said Attenberg. “That scene is reflective of how some men treat younger women and take advantage of bad situations. I wanted to create a character that would allow readers to feel less alone.”
  After high school, Andrea goes to art school in Chicago. Her own art dreams are thwarted after she becomes an assistant to a charismatic, abusive woman artist Felicia. Felicia systematically rips Andrea down, burying her artistic ambitions for years.
  “The teacher was a mentor, as well as a friend,” said Attenberg. “I wrote this relationship to show how it is the responsibility of women to support each other.”
  “I do think women can destroy each other in more specific ways than men can,” she said. “Friend break-ups are a million times worse than romantic break-ups.”
  “This book was a way for Andrea to look at everything that was important in her life,” said Attenberg. “Andrea is offering up what made this character who she is today.”
  Attenberg’s path as a successful novelist was nontraditional. “I had a very indirect path to a writing career,” she said. “I didn’t get an MFA, and I moved around a lot, all over the country. I met a lot of different people and got into all kinds of trouble.”
  Attenberg is from the Chicago suburbs. She moved to Seattle after college. “My aunt tells me that after I finished college, I told her that I was going to travel a lot. At 21, I knew that I was going to roam. My mother calls me the Wandering Jew.”
  By the late 1990s, Attenberg wound up in New York. At that time, she was an early blogger, writing about culture, dating and sex in her adopted Brooklyn neighborhood. She supported herself as a freelancer, writing shopping books and dull pharmaceutical copy. “Sometimes three months of freelance would pay for four months of my own writing,” she said
  First came Instant Love, followed by The Kept Man in 2008, which was narrated by a woman who discovers that her comatose artist husband had been having prolific affairs with Polish coffee shop waitresses in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as part of his last photo project.
  After Attenberg was dropped by her publisher and moved to Grand Central Publishing, her editor and new publisher tweaked her career, taking her out of the box of women’s fiction and promoting her as a literary novelist.
  “Grand Central knew what to do with me,” said Attenberg. My editor Helen Atsma saw The Middlesteins as a chance to relaunch my career. I had been marketed as a women’s fiction author, which was not true to the material I was writing. When you are mismarketed, when the audience picks up the book, they are not going to read it or talk about it. Word of mouth is what sells books. Half the battle is getting people to talk about your book, to tell their friends about it and to read it for their book club.”
  Loyal to her editor, Attenberg followed Atsma when she moved to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is publishing All Grown Up.
  Before The Middlesteins was published, Attenberg had doubled down on her writing career. “I was massively in debt,” she said. “Six months before The Middlesteins, I was couch surfing. It was probably foolish, but writing novels is the thrill I like to do, so I just went all in,” putting her expenses on her credit card. “Maybe I went too far. I was 40 and in bad financial shape.”
  Becoming a bestselling literary novelist had unexpected perks. “I didn’t really know how bad my career was until it became good,” said Attenberg. “I had been plugging along publishing books, but not selling that well. Before The Middlesteins, no one asked me to write for glossy magazines. No one asked me to speak at universities. Now there are travel opportunities and events to promote my books. Because I’ve published in Europe, I get invited back there, as well.”
  Attenberg is going old school with an upcoming epic bicoastal book tour, doing 27 events, mostly over a five-week period in March and April, swinging through the northeast, down to Key West, out to San Francisco, through the Midwest and the South. She’s hitting the great indie book stores, like Politics and Prose in D.C., Elliott Bay Books in Seattle and Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
  “It’s not the fanciest book tour ever, “ said Attenberg, “but my publishers are behind me and I feel super lucky. I’ve written three books in five years, and I’ve built good relations with the independent booksellers. I feel like I am coming home, because I am seeing the same faces again.”
  Attenberg looks forward to the conversations that will be had in newly toxic Trumpland. “I want to see what’s happening in America,” she said. “We are going to have an enormous conversation. Everything feels so urgent now.”
  Though based in Brooklyn for two decades, Attenberg’s wanderlust never abated. She’d sublet her loft for months, going out to a new city, like her sojourn in Los Angeles several years ago. Recently, she kept going back to New Orleans. “For the past five years, New Orleans has been my spot,” she said.
  A two-book deal pulled Attenberg out of debt and allowed her to buy a house in New Orleans. She splits her time between there and Brooklyn. “The house is called a side-hall shotgun, with all the rooms off one hallway,” she said. “It is a small house, but it has a beautiful office. New Orleans is a great place to write.”
  “I love New York for millions of reasons, but I am interested in quality of life,” said Attenberg. “My quality of life is better down in New Orleans. I was looking to where I wanted to be in my fifties, and I wanted to be here.”
  The title of her novel begs the question—does Attenberg feel grown up at 45? “Am I all grown up? I don’t know if anyone can be. I have this little house, a dog and a quiet and secure life,” she said. “I don’t even know if I was dreaming of that, but suddenly it became possible. For me, to have a home of my own feels like progress.”
  Speaking of home, Attenberg has already tapped into the New Orleans literary scene. “There are a lot of writers down here,” she said. “I helped organize a Writers Resist event recently. I knew some writers and met a lot more. There are a lot of journalists down here who write about New Orleans for other places. It is a fascinating place with a complicated history, and a lot of things to write about.”
  “I’ve met some great people,” said Attenberg. “I had my birthday dinner in November and I was at a table with people dressed in black. We were all writers. We all have shared sensibilities and neuroses. Wherever I go, I can’t escape that scene.”
  Featured photo by Melissa Hom.

• Wikipedia -

  Jami Attenberg
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Jump to: navigation, search
  Jami Attenberg

  Attenberg at the 2017 Texas Book Festival
  Alma mater
  Johns Hopkins University
  Occupation
  Writer
  Era
  21st-century
  Notable work
  The Middlesteins
  Saint Mazie
  All Grown Up
  Home town
  Buffalo Grove, Illinois
  Website
  jamiattenberg.com
  Jami Attenberg (born 1971 in Arlington Heights, Illinois[1]) is an American fiction writer and essayist. She is the author of a short story collection and five novels, including best-seller The Middlesteins.

  Contents [hide]
  1
  Early life
  2
  Career
  2.1
  Fiction
  2.2
  Essays
  3
  Personal life
  4
  References
  5
  External links

  Early life[edit]
  Attenberg grew up in Buffalo Grove, Illinois,[2] and graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in Writing.[3]
  Career[edit]
  Attenberg worked at HBO before deciding to devote herself to fiction writing, initially supported by temp jobs.[4] Attenberg has also worked at bookstore Saturday at Word in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a job she took after giving several readings at the store.[5]
  Fiction[edit]
  In 2006, Attenberg published a collection of short stories with Random/Shaye Areheart under the title Instant Love.[6] Two novels followed: The Kept Man (Riverhead, 2008)[7][8] and The Melting Season (2010).[9][10]
  Following a change in publisher and accompanying marketing strategy (with subsequent works promoted not as women's fiction but instead as literary fiction, including blurb from Jonathan Franzen on her third book),[4] Attenberg experienced a literary breakthrough in 2012 with her third novel The Middlesteins,[11][12][13][14][15] which became a New York Times bestseller[16] and was listed among the ten best-selling books on Amazon in 2012.[17] The Middlesteins was translated into multiple languages and Attenberg was nominated for multiple literature awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize[18] and the St. Francis College Literary Prize.[19]
  In 2015, Attenberg published her fifth book, Saint Mazie (Hachette).[20][21][22][23][24][25] Buzzfeed listed Saint Mazie as one of the 27 "Most Exciting Books of 2015."[26]
  Attenberg's next novel, All Grown Up, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US in March 2017,[27][28][29][30][31][32] and in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Holland in 2017–2018.
  Essays[edit]
  Attenberg's essays, treating a various topics, can be found in The New York Times,[33] The Wall Street Journal,[34] Vogue,[35] Elle[36] and Lenny Letter.[37]
  Personal life[edit]
  Attenberg splits her time between Brooklyn, NY, and New Orleans, LA.[38]

• Amazon -

  Jami Attenberg is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays about sex, urban life, and food to The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Lenny Letter, among other publications. She divides her time between Brooklyn and New Orleans.

• The Stranger - https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/03/22/25035487/next-stop-deathall-grown-up-author-jami-attenberg-on-the-pains-and-pleasures-of-touring-in-trumps-america

  SLOG
  Books
  Next Stop: Death—All Grown Up Author Jami Attenberg on the Pains and Pleasures of Touring in Trump’s America

  by Jami Attenberg • Mar 22, 2017 at 2:20 pm

  Jami Attenberg will appear in conversation with Maria Semple on Thurs, March 23 at Elliott Bay Book Company. Her sixth (and finest) novel, All Grown Up, is available now. Zack Smith Photography

  Ten days ago, I left New Orleans on a month-long tour for my sixth book, All Grown Up. At the airport I ran into a friend who was flying to his father’s funeral. He sadly motioned to the garment bag on his shoulder. “Yeah, I’ve got the all black suit. Things are heavy,” he said, and I gave him my condolences, and then he was gone. Five minutes later I ran into novelist Meg Wolitzer, who had just arrived for a speaking engagement at Tulane University. She complimented me on a recent radio interview of mine. I told her I hadn’t listened to it yet, because I just wanted to imagine it was perfect, and I knew the minute I heard the slightest mistake it would be ruined. She said, “That’s the way to do it. Pretend you’re a superhero, saving lives, flying overhead, and don’t stop to read what they say about you in the papers.” Then she rushed off, too. Two brief, humane interactions. And away we go.
  I’ve been off and on book tour for the last decade, starting in 2006 when my first book was published. Last year was an “off” year, which means I only did 16 events in three countries. The year before that my fifth book was published, and I did more than 60 events. It was not a good tour. I spent my birthday by myself eating a room service cheeseburger in a hotel room in Dallas, for example, and yes, I cried. A week after that I accidentally knocked myself out with Xanax at the Atlanta airport and missed my flight. A dramatic scene at the gate followed. It was not my finest moment. How could this be my job? I thought. Couldn’t this be someone else’s job?

  I mostly like touring but I think you have to know why you’re doing it, and what you hope to get out of it. My attitude (mostly) is that it’s a business trip. The good parts of touring are that you get to see new places and meet people who love literature and also, hopefully, sell some books. The bad parts of touring are that your entire life is put on hold for large swaths of time and it’s physically exhausting and you can’t stay on a regular schedule in terms of diet or exercise and often you (I) (but probably you, too) drink too much, and also sometimes people don’t go to your readings and there you are in a big empty room all by yourself.

  Next stop: death.
  I felt like I had to take last year off to save my soul. When you spend too much time defining yourself to strangers, the words begin to lose their value, and at the end there is not much of you left. So I slept, I read, I finished writing a new book, I ate, I drank, I walked my dog, I voted Democrat. Mostly, I felt better.

  This year, as my sixth book was published, I worried my soul would get all tore up again. But we are so fragile as a nation at this moment, how could I not go out there? It all feels deeper right now. Because this time I’m touring in an America where Donald Trump is the president and we’ve all been in turmoil for months and months. I wanted to reach out to everyone I met and take the temperature of this fine country and press a cold compress to its head and offer it chicken soup and chewable vitamin c tablets and a space to talk and connect and feel less alone. I wanted to see people, the readers of America, and I wanted to talk to them. And where better to do it than bookstores?

  But as it turns out, so far, mostly on this tour, we’ve been actively not talking about politics. I think people have been relieved to think about something else besides the thing that they think about all day long. So we talk about the creative process and we talk about feminism and we talk about writing about New York City and we talk about what it means to be an adult and we talk about dysfunctional families and we talk about sex. And we are all happy to be talking about human, thoughtful, literary things.
  Though at the storied Harvard Bookstore in Boston, I mentioned Melania Trump briefly, prompted by my annoyance at a headline reporting her increasing popularity because she had read to children at a hospital exactly once. I cracked a joke, “Congratulations Melania, you figured out how to volunteer, something thousands of other people do every single day.” No one laughed. I had popped the peaceful bubble of our moment together. I apologized for bringing her up. “How’s everyone doing with everything?” I said, referring to the state of the union. There was a wave of depressed, wan smiles. A few people shook their heads. Boston, I’m sorry. I failed you.

  But not every writer is interested in being there for the audience, because in fact, it is actually not our job. I remember seeing David Foster Wallace at Elliot Bay Books in the mid-‘90s, on tour supporting Infinite Jest. He was brash and young and dressed like an ultimate Frisbee player. He gave a short talk and reading from the book, and then opened the floor to questions. We were all terrified of him. Finally, a woman in the front row timidly raised her hand and asked him, “What inspires your work?” His response was, “If this is the level of questions I’m going to be asked, we can just end this right now.” To be fair to him, this is a terrible question, one that should never be asked of a writer, and particularly not an author who has written a thousand-page novel. Still, I thought: Whoa buddy, time to get off the road.

  But he was all alone up there on the stage, with no one to catch him if he fell. It’s hard when you’re the focus of attention, especially as so many writers are inherently introverts. The smartest thing I did when planning this tour was invite lots of other authors to be in conversation with me at every tour stop. In New York City, my old, dear friend Alexander Chee knew exactly when to bust my balls during our conversation. In Philadelphia, the always vivacious Jennifer Weiner brought me a care package that included the warmest mittens, which I needed as I had arrived unprepared for the impending snowstorm that would strike the next day as I headed to Washington DC.

  There was a chocolate bar in that care package too, which I savored while snowbound in my hotel room. That was the moment I realized I should have been flirting with men on my book tour the entire time. Picture me, in a hotel room, snow falling all around me, eating a chocolate bar, and thinking, I forgot something, what was it again? Oh yes, men.

  At one event at the stunning new home of Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn, I swapped places, being the interviewer this time, of brilliant, dynamic poet Morgan Parker, author of There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. What a pleasure it was to turn the focus off me and onto her, and half the audience had already read her book, which heightened the energy.

  It was cold and icy outside, but inside we were all there together. We talked some more about feminism and craft, and also about ghosts. “Y’all know time doesn’t move in a linear fashion, right?” said Morgan, at one point. A friend brought her adorable infant son, and we all cooed over him. Later, over drinks, I got to tell Hannah Tinti, the author of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, about how much I loved her new book. For me, this was a perfect book tour event: an engaged audience, a beautiful bookstore, and seeing friends.

  But with apologies to everyone who interviewed me at my events, the writer I was most looking forward to talking to was Judy Blume, who had invited me via Twitter to her bookstore in Key West. Judy and several others launched the store a year ago, and after our event (in which she asked me the best and smartest questions because she is Judy Blume, and she is a perfect human being), I had dinner with her and her husband and her two managers, Emily and Mia, at a beachside restaurant. We were all kind of high from the fun of the well-attended event, and I think, for them, the sense that they were building something exciting at the bookstore. They told me how well they all were working together at the store, and I could there was a collective mindset, a shared flow between them.

  The next morning Judy dropped me off at the airport for my next flight. We talked briefly about the mean-spirited budget the White House had just announced. Then we spoke again about the bookstore. “We know a lot more than we did a year ago about running it,” said Judy. “And we’ll keep learning.”

  Later at the airport the TV blasted a press conference of Donald Trump and Angela Merkel standing side-by-side. I know that look, I thought. She’s suffering him. And not gladly. I moved out of range of the television, so I wouldn’t have to look at his stupid orange face. He will not always be on that screen, I thought. And we will be waiting for that moment to arrive. And we will be working the entire time. For whatever comes next.

• The Millions - https://themillions.com/2017/03/you-cant-go-wrong-with-heart-an-interview-with-jami-attenberg.html

  You Can’t Go Wrong With Heart: The Millions Interviews Jami Attenberg
  The Millions Interview
  Edan Lepucki March 14, 2017

  I’d been hearing about Jami Attenberg’s latest novel, All Grown Up, long before it went on sale. Early readers loved it, and their praise produced a kind of roar across the Internet, one full of joy and ferocity. People were grateful for this story and this character: Andrea Bern, a single woman who doesn’t have kids, and doesn’t want them. When I finally got my hands on a copy, I saw what everyone was talking about; Andrea is like so many women I know, and yet, she is unlike most female characters in fiction. She is also more than her demographic (as we all are). Through a series of droll but big-hearted and compassionate vignettes, Attenberg depicts a profound and authentic portrait of a woman as she moves through this beautiful yet often unjust world. In All Grown Up, there is joy, loneliness, pleasure, despair, grief, hope, frivolity, and matters of great import.

  Jami Attenberg is The New York Times bestselling author of five other books, including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She was kind enough to answer my questions via email.
  The Millions: All Grown Up is told in a series of vignettes about Andrea’s life — there’s one terrific, pithy chapter early on, for instance, called, simply, “Andrea,” about how everyone keeps recommending the same book about being single. There are a few chapters about Andrea’s friend Indigo: in one she gets married, in another she has child, and so on. Some are about Andrea’s dating life, and others focus on her family. I’m curious about how working within this structure affected your understanding of Andrea herself, seeing as she comes into focus story by story, but not in a traditional, chronological way. I also wonder what you want the reader to feel, seeing her from these various angles, some of which overlap, while others don’t.
  Jami Attenberg: I made a list — I wish I could find it now; it’s in a notebook somewhere — of all these different parts of being an adult. For example: your relationship with your family, your career, your living situation, etc. And then I created story cycles around them, and often they were spread out over decades. As an example: what Andrea’s apartment was like when she was growing up versus how she felt about her apartment as an adult in her late 20s versus her late 30s, and how those memories informed her feelings of safety and security and space. A sense of home is a universal topic. And then eventually more relevant, nuanced parts of a specifically female adulthood emerged as I wrote, and little cycles formed around those subjects. So the writing of this book in terms of structure was really an accrual of these cycles.
  The goal was to tell the whole truth about this character, and why she had become the person she was — the adult she was, I guess — so that she could understand it/herself, and move on from it. The fact that it’s not linear is true to the story of our lives. The moments that inform our personalities come at us at different times. If you were to make a “What Makes Me the Way I Am” top 10 list in order of importance, there’s no way it would be in chronological order. And to me they’re all connected. I’d hope readers see some of their own life challenges in her, and if not her, in some of the other characters, even if they happen at different times. Everything keeps looping around again anyway. (We can’t escape our pasts, we are doomed to repeat ourselves, we are our parents, etc.)
  TM: In my mind, and likely in the minds of others, you lead an ideal “writer’s life” — you’re pretty prolific, for one, and you also don’t teach. You now live in two places: New Orleans and New York City — which seems chic and badass to me. Plus you have a dog with the perfect under bite! Can you talk a little about your day-to-day life as an artist, and what you think it’s taken (besides, say, the stars aligning), to get there? Any advice for writers who want to be like you when they’re all grown up?
  JA: It took me a long time to figure out what would make me happy, and this existence seems to be it, for a while anyway. I’m 45 now, and I started planning for this life a few years ago, but before then I had no vision except to keep writing, and that was going to be enough for me. Then, after my third winter stay in New Orleans, I realized I had truly fallen in love with the city. And then I had a dream, an actual adult goal. I had two cities I loved, and I wanted to be in both. So it has meant a lot to me to get to this place. I worked so hard to get here! I continue to work hard. No one hands it to you, I can tell you that much, unless you are born rich, which I was not, and even then that’s just money, it’s not exactly a career. And I think the career part, the getting to write and be published and be read part, is the most gratifying of all. Unless success is earned it is not success at all.
  My day-to-day life is wake, read, drink coffee, walk the dog, say hi to my neighbors, come home, be extremely quiet for hours, write, read, look at the Internet, eat, walk the dog, have a drink, freak out about the state of America, and have some dinner, maybe with friends. Soon I’ll be on tour for two months, and that will be a whole different way of living, though still part of my professional life. But when I am writing, it is a quiet and simple existence in which I take my work seriously. I have no advice at all to anyone except to keep working as hard as you possibly can.
  TM: I’ve always loved the sensuality of your writing. Whether the prose is describing eating, or having sex, or simply the varied textures of life in New York City, we are with your characters, inside their bodies. What is the process for you, in terms of inhabiting a character’s physical experience? Does it happen on the sentence level, or as you enter the fictive dream, or what?
  JA: Well thank you, Edan. I’m a former poet, for starters, so I’m always looking to up the language in a specific kind of way. I certainly close my eyes and try to be in the room with a character, and inside their flesh as well, I suppose. I write things to turn myself on. Even my bad sex scenes are in a strange way arousing to me, even if it’s just because they make me laugh. It’s all playtime for me.
  All of this kind of thinking comes in the early stages but also in my final edits of the second draft. Most of the lyricism of the work is done before I send the book out to my editor. Her notes to me address the nuts and bolts of plot and architecture, and often also emotions and character motivation. But the language, for the most part, she leaves to me.
  TM: My favorite relationship in the novel is between Andrea and her mother. It’s loving and comforting even though there are also real tensions and conflicts between them. Can you talk about creating a nuanced, and thus realistic, portrayal of mother and daughter?

  JA: It is also my favorite relationship! I could write the two of them forever. I am satisfied with the book as it stands but would still love to write a chapter where the two of them go to the Women’s March together, and Andrea’s mother knits her a pussy hat and Andrea doesn’t want to wear it because she only ever wears black. I have pages and pages of dialogue between them that I never used but wrote anyway just because they were fun together, or fun for me the author, but maybe not fun between the two of them.
  Their relationship really comes from living in New York City for 18 years and watching New York mothers and daughters together out in the world and just channeling that. These characters are very much a product of eavesdropping. I try to approach these kinds of family relationships like this: everyone is always wrong and everyone is always right. Like their patterns and emotions are already so ingrained that there’s no way out of it except through, because no one will ever win. But also there is love. Always there is love. And that’s how I know they’ll make it to the other side.
  TM: This novel has so many terrific female characters, who are at once immediately recognizable (sort of like tropes of contemporary womanhood, if that makes sense) and also unique. Aside from Andrea and her mother, there is Andrea’s sister-in-law, Greta, a once elegant and willowy magazine editor who is depleted (spiritually and otherwise) by her child’s illness; Indigo, ethereal yoga teacher turned rich wife and mother, and then divorcée and single mother; the actress with the great shoes who moves into Andrea’s building; Andrea’s younger and (seemingly?) self-possessed coworker Nina. They’re all magnetic — and they also all fail to hold onto that magnetism. Their cool grace, at least in Andrea’s eyes, is tarnished, often by the burdens of life itself. Did you set out to have these women orbiting Andrea, contrasting her, sometimes echoing her, or was there another motivation in mind?
  JA: These women were all there from the beginning — all of them. I had to grow them and inform them, but there were no surprise appearances. I never thought — oh where did she come from? They were all just real women living and working in today’s New York City, and also they were real women who lived inside of me. I needed each of these women to be in the book or it wouldn’t have been complete. And also I certainly needed them to question Andrea. For example, her sister-in-law in particular sometimes acts as a stand-in for what I imagine the reader must be thinking, while her mother acts as a stand-in for me, both of them interrogating Andrea at various times.
  And also always, always, always in my work the female characters are going to be the most interesting. Most of the chapters are named after women. I had no doubt in my mind that I wanted a collective female energy to buoy this book. We’re always steering the fucking ship, whether it’s acknowledged or not.
  TM: Were there any models for this book in terms of voice, structure, tone of subject? Are there, in general, any authors and novels that are “fairy godmothers” for you and your writing?
  JA: Each book is different, I have a different reading list, but Grace Paley is my mothership no matter what, because of her originality, grasp of voice and dialect, and incredible heart and compassion.

  As I began writing All Grown Up, I was reading Patti Smith’s M Train and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and when I was halfway done with the book I started reading Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls. I was not terribly interested in fiction for the most part. I wanted this book to feel memoiristic — not like an actual memoir, that one writes and tries to put in neat little box, perfect essays or chapters, but just genuinely like this woman was telling you every single goddamn, messy thing you needed to know about her life.
  Those three books all feel like unique takes on the memoir. Patti Smith just talks about whatever the fuck she wants to talk about, and Maggie Nelson writes in those short, meticulous, highly structured bursts, where you genuinely feel like she is making her case, and in Chelsea Girls Eileen has this dreamy, meandering quality, although she knows exactly what she’s doing, she’s scooping you up and putting you in her pocket and taking you with her wherever she wants to go. So all of those books somehow connected together for me while I was establishing the feel of this book.

  And when I was finishing I read Naomi Jackson’s gorgeous debut, The Star Side of Bird Hill, which is also about family and a collection of strong women and coming of age, although the people growing up in her book are much younger than my narrator. But it was just stunning, and it made me cry, and the emotions felt so real and true. So I think reading her was an excellent inspiration as I wrote those final pages. Like you can’t go wrong with heart.
  TM: Since is The Millions, I must ask you: What was the last great book you read?
  JA: I just judged the Pen/Bingham contest and all of the books on our shortlist were wonderful: Insurrections by Rion Amilcar Scott; We Show What We Have Learned by Clare Beams; The Mothers by Brit Bennett; Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and Hurt People by Cote Smith.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/our-weapons-always-an-interview-with-jami-attenberg-author-of-all-grown-up/#!

  Our Weapons Always: An Interview with Jami Attenberg, Author of “All Grown Up”
  Eric Nelson interviews Jami Attenberg

  MARCH 8, 2017

  IT IS 9 a.m. in New Orleans, during the city’s annual Mardi Gras celebration, as Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins and 2015’s Saint Mazie, sits down to answer questions over Gchat. Her new novel, All Grown Up, set to be released on March 7, reflects on the social pressures placed on women as they mature and enter adulthood. The past life of the book’s protagonist, Andrea, unfolds through flashbacks while her Brooklyn neighborhood changes in present time. The reader takes on the role of voyeur, following Andrea to weddings, work, and family visits in New Hampshire. During our two-hour conversation, Attenberg speaks about the first-person narrative and literature in Trump-era America.
  ¤
  ERIC NELSON: All Grown Up seems to be written almost in a constant stream of consciousness. What made you choose a first-person narrative to tell Andrea’s story?
  JAMI ATTENBERG: All of my books start with a character speaking to me and demanding to be heard. There are times when I’m in their shoes but I need a little remove from them, so I can have some authorial control, and that’s when I’ll go with a close third. And there are times when I’m instantly up close to the character, first person, really in their skin, and I feel like I know them right away, and I’ll just go first-person, because I’m already there. So I think in this case it was easy to step into the first person, because the character allowed me in so easily.
  In terms of what effect I wanted it to have, I was hoping for it to feel immediate, exhilarating, and highly confessional. Also I wanted the book to feel memoiristic, without seeming like a formally constructed memoir that someone has set out to write. And I wanted it to feel conversational, as if Andrea were directly talking to the reader, as if she were revealing the contents of her soul to the reader. When I think about Andrea explaining what this book is, I imagine her saying, “Here’s everything you need to know about me in one place.”
  I remember you writing on your blog some time ago about how many male critics presume books written by women must be autobiographical. What is behind this assumption? Misogyny? Lazy criticism?
  To be fair, I’ve had women ask me this question too, although certainly not as many, and I find that women who have read this book have many other questions to ask besides that.
  But I would say in general it’s a lazy question to ask, and I think the critic or interviewer isn’t doing enough work as a reader or a thinker if they can’t get beyond that question. Writers work so hard to create a specific and unique piece of art that rises above our particular reality. When the interviewer doesn’t want to figure out a way to ask the author about their lives in an interesting way, or can’t be bothered to dig deep enough into the text to move beyond the superficial, suggests a certain kind of boredom on their part. And I am sympathetic: not everyone loves what they do for a living; we grow uninvested over time. I certainly get bored of answering questions after a while.
  Also, obviously, some writers offer their material up as autobiographical — I’ve noticed Elif Batuman describes her new book as “semi-autobiographical,” and I look forward to it and all of her press — but the interviewer just needs to do the work to decide if that’s the right question to be asking. I’ve had three books come out in the last five years, so I’m a real student of press and the way people talk about their books. I think laziness or lack of time may be the real cause of the problem here. I’ll save the sexist label for the men who tell me that they’re surprised they like my work because they were certain it was going to be chick lit.
  How did the process of writing All Grown Up differ from that of writing Saint Mazie, which required some research on your part for the historical setting on the Bowery in the early 20th century? How was your mindset different while writing it?
  After spending two years writing Mazie and another year promoting it, I was more than happy to move on to the contemporary era. I spent a lot of time researching Mazie, and there were also a multitude of first-person voices in that book, so it was just a slower process in general. There was just a lot I had to get right. Also, I was trying to do justice to the real-life Mazie and all she accomplished. I could not fuck it up. There were a lot of layers to the process.
  So setting a book in a modern era with a present tense, wholly invented, contemporary voice enabled me to have a really vivid writing energy. I was beholden to nothing. And because of that I wrote it quickly. Most of the first draft was done within a six-month period.
  Which brings me to editing. In an interview with Emily Gould, you’re quoted as saying, “I am really unsentimental about throwing things away.” How does a writer keep that distance and know what is unnecessary without losing a sense of empathy for the characters they’ve created?
  Just because it doesn’t get published doesn’t mean it never existed. If I write a scene between two characters and I learn something about them, even if I don’t use that scene, not even a phrase from it, I’ve still acquired that knowledge about the character, which could ultimately inform some other moment down the line. So it exists because I maintain that knowledge.
  As an example, with my new book, I wrote pages of dialogue between my narrator, Andrea, who is just about to turn 40, and her co-worker Nina, who is 26 years old, where they discuss all the drugs they’ve ever done in their lives. It was never meant to be published. But in writing it I established a bond between them, an openness and an honesty in their conversations. That shows up in the book. I like to think the reader could easily imagine they’ve had this conversation without ever knowing it had happened. And I liked both of the characters better after I finished writing it.
  But you asked “how,” and I don’t know if I’ve answered that question. How do we know what is unnecessary? That comes from instinct and experience, and there is no shortcut, although editors can be helpful in this area. And how do we maintain a sense of empathy? God help us all in these cruel modern times to maintain our sense of empathy.
  How are you coping in the current political climate? At one point in the book, when the protagonist Andrea is in New Hampshire visiting her brother and sister-in-law, there’s the mention of Trump lawn signs. But surely things have become more openly toxic in the 24-hour news cycle since the election.
  I both regret and don’t regret slipping those lawn signs into the book. I regret having his name in my book — because fuck that guy, obviously — but I don’t regret it, because it makes the book feel immediate and current and accurate to the time in which it was set, which was actually 2016. At the time I wrote it, it was more of just a little joke to myself. Well, the joke’s on me now, isn’t it? (And all of us.)
  I am personally coping just fine, because I am a middle-aged, middle-class white person who currently has all of her rights intact. It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s our immigrant population, women fighting to maintain control of their reproductive rights, people of lower income, people of color who are treated unfairly by our police and judicial system, people who desperately need affordable healthcare in order to stay alive … I could go on and on. The distress I feel is nothing in comparison to the distress of these people. Sure, I feel shattered by the news on a daily basis, but I think everyone I know is capable of moving beyond the shell shock toward focusing on resisting this new regime and helping our communities grow stronger.
  What is the role of writers right now? Do they have a responsibility that goes beyond telling an entertaining, well-constructed story?
  I’m certain I’m preaching to the converted with this audience, so forgive me if you’ve already made your three phone calls today to your elected officials. Writers at a minimum have a responsibility to fight for freedom of speech. (However much you are capable of committing your time, of course.) It can mean figuring out ways to work within our communities either through activism or education, and supporting organizations working at a national and international level as well, such as ACLU or PEN. And that also means taking our work seriously.
  But look, we can only write about what makes us feel passionate. People shouldn’t have to throw away the 150 pages of a novel they were working on before the election just because it doesn’t feel relevant to our current political nightmare. Human emotions and a good story are always relevant. Writing with compassion and intelligence, those are our weapons always.
  I do admit I am completely fascinated to see what kind of writing comes out of this moment. It’ll be a few years, but we’ll start to see a cycle of post-election writing getting published. If people channel half the energy into their fiction that they put into their tweets and protest signs, we’re in for some great writing.
  ¤
  Eric Nelson is a fiction writer and cultural critic living in Queens, New York.

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/24/jami-attenberg-interview-women-all-grown-up

  Jami Attenberg: ‘I wanted to see if there were other happy endings for single women’
  The US writer on epic plots, small moments and creating tricky, independent heroines

  Hadley Freeman
  @HadleyFreeman
  Fri 24 Mar 2017 13.00 GMT
  Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 09.47 GMT

  View more sharing options

  Shares
  682

  Comments
  261

  ‘I just loved writing more than anything else’ … Jami Attenberg. Photograph: Michael Sharkey/Zack Smith Photography
  I
  n her new novel, All Grown Up, Jami Attenberg has done what many long assumed to be impossible: she has coined a smart and original take on the single woman in a big city. Just when the shtick seemed hopelessly exhausted by decades of Bridget Jones, Sex and the City, bad chicklit and worse romcoms, along comes Attenberg’s heroine, Andrea. Spiky, utterly uninterested in marriage or babies, the daughter of an activist mother, she is broken but not in a way a relationship could or should fix. An individual but at once so familiar that every line seems to sing effortlessly off the page. In a typically wry and layered moment, Andrea, addressing herself, describes when her sister-in-law got pregnant:
  You throw a baby shower, at which you drink too many mimosas and cry in the bathroom, but you are pretty sure no one notices. It’s not that you want a baby, or want to get married, or any of it. It’s not your bag. You just feel tired for some reason. Tired of the world. Tired of trying to fit in where you don’t. You go home that night and draw the Empire State Building and you feel hopeful doing this thing you love to do, so hopeful you look up online what tonight’s [lights on the building] mean and find out it’s in honour of National Eating Disorders Day and you get depressed all over again even though you’ve never had an eating disorder in your life.
  “I’d always felt frustrated with the depiction of single women in movies, TV shows and books because they always feel very centred around the romantic ending,” says Attenberg when we meet in a bar near her home in Brooklyn. “I wanted to see if there were other kinds of happy endings.”
  To do this, Attenberg has structured her novel as a series of linked short stories that jump around in time, encompassing not just Andrea’s past and present but also those of her family, friends and lovers. The stories, which can be about something as simple as a botched flirtation at a wedding or as complex as Andrea’s father’s long-term heroin addiction, provide a satisfyingly thorough portrait of all of their lives, explaining how they got to where they are when we meet them. They also suggest all kinds of different endings for single women in fiction that are always realistic and often optimistic.
  “I wanted you to know everything about Andrea, and I felt if we made a list of the most important things about our lives it would never be in order. It would be: ‘seven is the guy I made out with in high school’, ‘eight is the guy I made out with last week’, and ‘nine is the job I got fired from when I was 30’. While I always want to write epic sweeping plots, my work is character-driven and small moments that take you forward.”
  I knew the book was going to force me to evaluate where I was at with my life, and I didn’t know if I wanted to do that
  In the case of this novel, these small moments are all unmistakably tied to life as a 40-year-old single woman in the 21st century: all your Facebook friends posting on your wall about how you have to read the new book about what life is like as a single woman; being patronised by men who are far more neurotic about being single than you; finding out the friend you thought you’d lost to the perfect marriage is unexpectedly getting divorced.
  But as natural as the book feels, Attenberg resisted it. She started off by writing three of the stories, but then quickly shut them away in a drawer.
  “I was like, I don’t want to write this book because it’s going to be super annoying,” she says, in a voice that slips into somewhat endearing teenage-like inflections. “Not to write, but I knew it was going to force me to evaluate where I was at with my life as well, and then talk about it, and I didn’t know if I wanted to do that. You know, I grew up in a small midwestern town, where every third house on the block looked the same and there were not really any single people. My instincts to get out were always there, but those expectations were still something that formed me to a certain extent about what was supposed to make me happy. I think it’s important that someone writes stories that show something else, so I finally decided to do it.”
  And yet some of her fears about writing this book were soon justified. When we meet she had recently done an interview and the (male) journalist asked what her marital status is: “I was like, I can’t believe you asked that question when the whole point of my book is that it shouldn’t matter!”
  Attenberg, 45, has for some time been building up a reputation as the writer par excellence of tricky, independent women. Her third novel, the bestselling breakout The Middlesteins (2012), is a warm and expansive story of a dysfunctional suburban family, including Edie, a compulsive eater who never should have married her husband, and her thorny daughter, Robin, who whispers “This doesn’t mean anything” to men as she has sex with them. Saint Mazie (2015) is a brilliantly constructed fictionalised oral history of Mazie Gordon-Phillips, a real woman from 1920s New York, who Attenberg first discovered when a friend gave her a copy of Joseph Mitchell’s 1940 New Yorker profile.

  Facebook

  Twitter

  Pinterest
  Same old shtick … Sex and the City back in 2007. Photograph: Startraks Photo/Rex/Shutterstock
  “I didn’t want nothing to do with marriage with a respectable man or any other kind of man,” Attenberg’s Mazie declares stoutly at the beginning. “Not once in my life did I ever dream of my wedding day, no white dresses, no goddamn diamond rings. I only ever dreamed of freedom.” It could be the mantra of most of Attenberg’s heroines.
  As it happens, the bar we are meeting in is owned by the friend who gave her that profile, and is called Saint Mazie. I tell her I’ll now picture this bar as the one Andrea hangs out in, and Attenberg looks surprised.
  “Oh no, I wasn’t thinking of this place. Although the room downstairs is where I imagined Andrea hosting her birthday dinner …”
  As screenwriter Nora Ephron once wrote, “the words ‘thinly disguised [autobiography]’ are applied mostly to books by women”, and asking Attenberg about the overlaps between her books and life feels cheap. But the question is unavoidable from the moment she walks into the bar.
  “I have big breasts and a tiny waist and round hips, round but narrow, and big fistfuls of curls, and well-manicured eyebrows, and rosy cheeks, and I wear all black, and I have a cool, smart look to me, angled and soft at the same time. I got my thing going on,” is how Andrea describes herself in All Grown Up, and it is a pretty bang on description of Attenberg, although she is shocked to near speechlessness when I say this.
  “But she’s short! I’m not short. And OK, she has a brother, and so do I, and she works in advertising, and I did that, and she lives in Brooklyn. And she is Jewish, but she’s an Upper West Side Jew, which is a different flavour from a suburban Jew. But I pictured her as, not me in a parallel universe, but someone I’d pass in the subway station. My mother said, ‘She sounds like you, but she’s not you,’ and a friend said, ‘It’s like she’s your worst nightmare life.’”
  That latter description sounds especially plausible. A major theme in the novel is Andrea’s regret about giving up her dream of being an artist to work in advertising. Attenberg went the other way. After “getting the heck out” of suburban Illinois, Attenberg studied writing at Johns Hopkins University, where her senior fiction professor, the novelist Robert Stone, “hated” her writing.
  “Right before I graduated he was like, ‘You know, honey,’ – honey! – ‘you can still work in publishing. You can be a publicist.’ My impression of him was that he didn’t like writing by women that much, and I think that was the last time I let a man tell me I couldn’t do a thing I wanted to do,” says Attenberg.
  She travelled and temped all around America for the next few years, always writing but not sure what to do with it. She briefly lived “kind of a hippy life” (“I never really fit in – I admired the spirit but I didn’t like fish”) before moving to New York in the late 90s, where she worked in an advertising office.

  Facebook

  Twitter

  Pinterest
  Cover quote … Jonathan Franzen’s recommendation opened doors for Attenberg. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
  “People who were married with kids there used to say to me with this weird envy in their voices, ‘Oh you’re living the dream – you have all this freedom,’ and I was like, ‘No, you’re supposed to be the one who’s living the dream.’ But they always made it sound like it wasn’t much fun. So that was how I got to see the other side,” she says.
  After a stint working at HBO, Attenberg made a decision to commit to fiction, so she quit her job and interspersed novel writing with temp jobs. She completed three well-reviewed books – Instant Love, The Melting Season, The Kept Man – but had, she wrote in 2012, “what is politely called a ‘challenging track record’ in the publishing industry. Getting three books published means I am technically a success, but if you ask some people, my empty bank account unequivocally means I am a failure.”
  Three books published means I am technically a success, but if you ask some, my empty bank account means I am a failure
  She lived in 26 different homes over a decade, reliant on the kindness of friends and cheap rent where she could find it. Does she think she’d still be living that peripatetic life if things hadn’t turned around?
  “I don’t know. Something had to give, I guess, but I’d accepted that writing was the thing I wanted to do, because I just loved it more than anything else. I just felt it was what I was supposed to do with my life, but it was really hard. I can’t imagine what would have happened if I’d decided to be the other person [who gave it up]. I don’t live in fear of that, not any more.”
  In 2012, two things changed everything: first, Attenberg moved publisher. “Before, I was being marketed as women’s fiction, and now I’m with a publisher who said, ‘No, this is literary fiction, and we won’t ever put a woman looking wistful on your covers.’ And that was huge for me.” The next was that The Middlesteins became a bestseller, helped, she thinks, by Jonathan Franzen giving a quote for its front cover, praising Attenberg’s “sympathy and the artistry of her storytelling”. This, she says, “was mentioned in every book review, sexist as that probably is, and it gave me a whole new level of credibility.” Although not as much as some: Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding came out at exactly the same time, was also about a dysfunctional midwest family and had been praised by Franzen: “It was reviewed everywhere, whereas mine wasn’t in the New York Times Book Review until three months after it came out,” she shrugs. Although once it finally got there, it got a front-page rave.
  The sidelining of women’s stories and female writers is one of Attenberg’s real bugbears. The day before we met, she tweeted her disgust that the actor Drew Barrymore, who wrote about her 10 favourite books for the New York Times, hadn’t included a single one written by a woman.
  “Seriously, what the FUCK, dude? ‘Charles Bukowski was always on point.’ I mean, Bukowski was the opposite of on point,” she laughs.
  After publishing three books in five years (“I guess I had a lot to say”), Attenberg is thinking of taking a little break and has been judging books for literary competitions. “And that’s where I see a real change happening – so many writers of colour, so many women, trans voices. So no matter what the current political situation is, I think things are changing. Slowly. Maybe,” she says. And when she laughs she sounds, characteristically, both cynical and hopeful.
  • All Grown Up is published by Serpents Tail. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• Jami Attenberg Website - http://www.jamiattenberg.com/

  Jami Attenberg has written about sex, technology, design, books, television, and urban life for The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Lenny Letter and others. In 2017, HMH Books (US) and Serpent's Tail (UK) published her novel All Grown Up. It will also be published in Italy, Germany, France, Holland, Poland, Russia, China, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Spain, Portugal and Hungary in 2018.
  Her debut collection of stories, Instant Love, was published in 2006, followed by the novels The Kept Man and The Melting Season. Her fourth book, The Middlesteins, was published in October 2012. It appeared on The New York Times bestseller list, and was published in ten countries in 2013. It was also a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and has been optioned by Showtime. A fifth book, Saint Mazie, was published in 2015 in the U.S. and the UK, and in Italy, France and Germany in 2016, and has been optioned by Fable Pictures. Her work will be published in a total of sixteen languages.
  She lives in New Orleans, LA.

The fearful forties

Claire Lowdon
Spectator. 333.9845 (May 6, 2017): p34+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
All Grown Up
by Jami Attenberg
Serpent's Tail, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 197
In an early chapter of All Grown Up, the narrator Andrea says to her therapist: 'Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me? I'm other things, too.' 'Tell me who you are, then,' says the therapist. And so Andrea tells her that she's a woman, a New Yorker, that she works in advertising as a designer, that she's a daughter, a sister and an aunt. In her head, she adds: 'I'm alone. I'm a drinker. I'm a former artist. I'm a shrieker in bed. I'm the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.'
We meet Andrea when she's 39, asking herself, with increasing desperation, 'What next?' This is emphatically, refreshingly, not a novel about being single: it is a novel about not knowing what it is that you want. Often, Andrea finds this difficult:
People architect new lives all the time. I know
this because I never see them again once they
find these new lives ... It happens constantly.
It's just me. I haven't built anything new. I'm
the one getting left behind.
At other times, though, her improvised life is a source of joy and even pride. She compares herself to her impossibly perfect friend Indigo, whose
life is architected, elegant and angular, a beauty
to behold, and mine is a stew, a juicy, sloppy
mess of ingredients and feelings and emotions,
too much salt and spice, too much anxiety,
always a little dribbling down the front of my
shirt. But have you tasted it? Have you tasted
it? It's delicious.
Perhaps a better gastronomic analogy for Jami Attenberg's novel would be a cheese souffle--light yet rich, with a saving smidgen of nose-watering mustard powder. This is certainly true of the opening chapters, which pile up overlapping vignettes to give us a swift, compelling portrait of our narrator, guzzling wine and racing through bedfellows. All Grown Up avoids Sex-and-the-City territory, thanks to breakneck speed and Teflon-tough humour. Here the narrator describes a fellow wedding guest:
The fourth woman is Karen, a real career gal.
I say this not to make fun of her but because
she described herself as such, which means it
is doubly true.
Andrea gives in to temptation and calls her dealer after years of abstinence:
You can't believe the number still works. He
says, 'It's been a while since we last met.' You
say, 'I've been busy,' as if you need to justify
why you're not doing drugs anymore.
But in this short novel's second half, the souffle starts to sag. The warning signs had been there when, early on, Andrea meets a friendly furniture mover called Alonzo, who senses she's carrying a lot of something and lays on his hands.
I start to feel a ball of heat gathering in my
chest, above my breasts, just beneath my clavicle,
and I hear Alonzo mutter, 'There it is'.
If any part of you struggles to take this seriously, then you are likely to fall out of love with this initially lovable book -because it soon starts to take itself very seriously indeed. The Andrea of the first half is deliciously alive to Insta-speak phoneyisms. As Indigo describes new motherhood,'she looks at her child, deeply, nearly lustily. Don't say it, I think. "Blessed," she sighs.' By the 14th chapter, Andrea herself is trotting out such banalities as 'today is not about me. Today is about her', entirely without irony. Or how about, 'We've been working really hard at hanging out one-on-one ever since she and her husband split up'?
As Andrea turns 40 and mortality starts to bite, the various narratives fail to cohere. Her dying infant niece feels like an unsuccessful attempt to add emotional heft. A backstory about her father, who died from a heroin overdose, is retold so many times that Andrea starts to remind you of that annoying, guilt-inducing friend who keeps alluding to her one-time self-harm habit / bout of anorexia / nasty ex, just so you won't forget what she's been through.
'A thing I know now as an adult is this,' she tells us towards the end. 'There is no one cooler than a teenager. After our teenage years the game is over and we're all just holding on till death.' Those who disagree should skip the souffle.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lowdon, Claire. "The fearful forties." Spectator, 6 May 2017, p. 34+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498477887/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1a4f6905. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A498477887

Attenberg, Jami. All Grown Up

Liz French
Library Journal. 142.3 (Feb. 15, 2017): p73.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Attenberg, Jami. All Grown Up. Houghton Harcourt. Mar. 2017. 208p. ISBN 9780544824249. $25. F
Andrea Bern is a mixed-up, messed-up native New Yorker, the type you meet at a party and take an instant liking to, but by evening's end you're inching toward the exit. Then the next day you wonder what she's up to; perhaps she's free to meet for coffee. Attenberg's (Saint Maizie; The Middlesteins) heroine tells her story in choppy, time-hopping vignettes that evoke laughter, occasional revulsion, sympathy, and exasperation. Andrea has anger issues, she drinks too much, she hates her job but can't quit, she bed-hops and obsesses. Backtracking chapters explain some of the pain--a mentor rejects her, her father ODs when she's a teen, her distracted mother isn't there for her. But Andrea's a survivor, a funny observer of her off-kilter life. Not all the supporting characters are fleshed out, an ailing child is less than a Macguffin, but the author perfectly captures the voice of a special New Yorker and her city. VERDICT Attenberg's novel is layered and deceptive, as is her heroine. You'll enter Andrea's world for the throwaway lines and sardonic humor, but stay for the poignancy and depth. Recommended for readers who like complicated characters a la Jennifer Egan and Maria Semple. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]--Liz French, Library Journal
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
French, Liz. "Attenberg, Jami. All Grown Up." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 73. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A481649055/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f6dd3045. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A481649055

All Grown Up

Annie Bostrom
Booklist. 113.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2017): p33.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* All Grown Up. By Jami Attenberg. Mar. 2017. 208p. HMH, $25 (9780544824249).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It's a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in her late thirties must be in want of a husband and kids. Guilty of making these assumptions about Andrea Bern are her mother, her friends, and even some of the guys she just wants to sleep with. She works, she parties, she dates, she buys herself a steak dinner when she feels like it. She mocks the advertising job she could do blindfolded, and still writhes from abandoning her artistic career, ages ago now. She's unsettled by her brother and sister-in-law, once a gracious dream couple, who are faltering through their daughter's profound sickness; by her mother's leaving her to go help them out; and by memories of the father she lost. Told in vignettes that circle around and through one another--much like the daily drawings Andrea makes of the Empire State Building, until the view from her Brooklyn apartment is blocked--Andrea's story is stinging, sweet, and remarkably fleshed out in relatively few pages. Attenberg follows her best-selling family novel, The Middlesteins (2012) with a creative, vivid tableau of one woman's whole life, which almost can't help but be a comment on all the things women ought to be and to want, which Attenberg conveys with immense, aching charm.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "All Grown Up." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A479077936/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d436bc19. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A479077936

Attenberg, Jami: ALL GROWN UP

Kirkus Reviews. (Jan. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Attenberg, Jami ALL GROWN UP Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Fiction) $25.00 3, 7 ISBN: 978-0-544-82424-9
Deeply perceptive and dryly hilarious, Attenberg's (Saint Mazie, 2015, etc.) latest novel follows Andrea Bern: on the cusp of 40, single, child-free by choice, and reasonably content, she's living a life that still, even now, bucks societal conventions. But without the benchmarks of "grown up" success--an engagement, a husband, a baby--Andrea is left to navigate her own shifting understanding of adulthood."Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me? I'm other things, too," Andrea says, much to the delight of her therapist, who wants to know, then, what exactly those other things are. She is a woman, Andrea says. A designer who works in advertising; a New Yorker; technically, a Jew. A friend, she tells her therapist. A daughter, a sister, an aunt. Here are the things that Andrea does not say: she's alone. A drinker. A former artist. A shrieker in bed. At 39, Andrea is neither an aspirational figure nor a cautionary tale of urban solitude. She is, instead, a human being, a person who, a few years ago, got a pair of raises at work and paid off her debt from her abandoned graduate program and then bought some real furniture, as well as proper wine glasses. And still she does not fully compute to the people around her, people whose "lives are constructed like buildings, each precious but totally unsurprising block stacked before your eyes." Everyone is married or marrying, parenting or pregnant, and it's not so much that she's lusting after these things, specifically--neither marriage nor babies is her "bag," anyway--so much as it's that her lack of them puts her at odds with the adult world and its definitions of progress. Structured as a series of addictive vignettes--they fly by if you let them, though they deserve to be savored--the novel is a study not only of Andrea, but of her entire ecosystem: her gorgeous, earthy best friend whose perfect marriage maybe isn't; her much younger co-worker; her friend, the broke artist, who is also her ex-boyfriend and sometimes her current one. And above all, her brother and his wife, whose marriage, once a living affirmation of the possibility of love, is now crumbling under the pressure of their terminally ill child. Wry, sharp, and profoundly kind; a necessary pleasure.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Attenberg, Jami: ALL GROWN UP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A475357393/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=396047c0. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357393

'All Grown Up,' by Jami Attenberg, is an X-ray of Gen X life

Meredith Maran
Washingtonpost.com. (Mar. 2, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
Full Text:
Byline: Meredith Maran
Feminism ain't what it used to be. If we didn't know that before, we've known it since Jan. 21, when millions of American women, men, children and genderqueer others put on their pink pussyhats and took to the streets, chanting slogans that might have made Betty Friedan blush: "Viva la vulva!""Pussy grabs back!"
"It's like Mardi Gras, but for our vaginas," Jami Attenberg tweeted about the Women's March. Like her tweets and the fourth-wave feminism of which she's a proud proponent, Attenberg's works of fiction raise the voices of feisty female protagonists.
"All Grown Up," Attenberg's latest book, is an inventive, funny, fragmented clutter. Billed as a novel, it reads more like a linked story collection, with plots, timelines and characters that swerve and fold into each other. At its best, this form makes an effective container for a life that's painfully disorganized. At its not-so-best, it creates redundancies that annoy rather than illuminate.
The book's protagonist is a 39-year-old, relentlessly single, mildly insufferable, far-from-grown-up Andrea Bern. Daughter of an activist mother and drug-overdosed father, Andrea narrates her post-patriarchal trek through the white-people problems of her waning 30s.
"Brooklyn apartment in a changing neighborhood," Andrea introduces herself, "why move when the rent is so cheap? Mediocre but well-paying job. . . . You also drink plenty and for a long time use, too, coke and ecstasy mainly. . . . There are men also, in your bed, foggily, but you are less interested in them than in muffling the voice in your head that says you are doing absolutely nothing with your life."
A stalled-out protagonist can grow tedious. But Attenberg's gift for reducing her generation to its lowest common cultural denominator, then drawing social insights from the roux, imbues Andrea's travails with meaning. "Other people you know," Andrea reflects, "have no problem at all with succeeding at their careers and buying apartments and moving to other cities and falling in love and getting married and hyphenating their names and adopting rescue cats and, finally, having children."
But Andrea has a problem with all of it. Her passion is painting, but she works as an advertising designer. She's intentionally child-free and intolerant of those who choose otherwise. She gets drunk and hooks up with losers, then scornfully envies her married friends. One of the book's funniest scenes depicts Andrea's visit to Indigo, her once-bestie, now a new mother. The reader knows what Indigo doesn't: Motherhood is a friendship dealbreaker for Andrea. When Indigo hands over her baby for praise, Andrea thinks, "I would rather have a glass of wine."
Andrea's faux-tragic existence is temporarily interrupted by an actual tragedy: Her brother David and sister-in-law Greta's newborn daughter is terminally ill. Initially, Andrea impersonates a better aunt and sister than she is, but the family's move to New Hampshire gives her the out she needs. "Greta grabbed my hands. 'Promise you'll come and see her,' she said. I promised. Then I got on the train to Boston. That was two years ago."
If HBO's "Girls" is a time capsule of Lena Dunham's millennials, "All Grown Up" is an X-ray of Gen X. Like those "Girls," Andrea and her friends are young women for whom the whole world has opened. They've grown up believing they're the captains of their careers, their sexuality, their lives. Yet they find themselves floundering, dulled by alcohol and irony, drowning in a sea of seemingly limitless choices, lurching toward decision-making in overthought fits and starts. What, "All Grown Up" asks, hath feminism wrought?
It's hard to love a book whose protagonist is as unlovable as Andrea. And yet "All Grown Up" is a smart, addictive, hilarious and relevant novel. This paradox is a credit to Attenberg's wit and scathing social observations, which offer up an affectionate, insightful portrait of her tribe.
"I'm crying on this airplane right now for the future of American students and I don't even LIKE children," Attenberg tweeted when President Trump's pick for education secretary was confirmed. With her irreverently relevant tweets and her fashionably shod feet planted firmly on terra hipstah, Attenberg is not your mother's feminist. Her dispatches from inside Gen X are as necessary as they are hilarious.
Meredith Maran's latest book, "The New Old Me," was published by Blue Rider on Tuesday.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Maran, Meredith. "'All Grown Up,' by Jami Attenberg, is an X-ray of Gen X life." Washingtonpost.com, 2 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A483795496/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1561b432. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A483795496

Lowdon, Claire. "The fearful forties." Spectator, 6 May 2017, p. 34+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498477887/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1a4f6905. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018. French, Liz. "Attenberg, Jami. All Grown Up." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 73. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A481649055/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f6dd3045. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018. Bostrom, Annie. "All Grown Up." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A479077936/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d436bc19. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018. "Attenberg, Jami: ALL GROWN UP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A475357393/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=396047c0. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018. Maran, Meredith. "'All Grown Up,' by Jami Attenberg, is an X-ray of Gen X life." Washingtonpost.com, 2 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A483795496/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1561b432. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018.

Word Count