All Grown Up
Jami Atttenberg, 2017
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544824249
Summary
A wickedly funny novel about a thirty-nine-year-old single, childfree woman who defies convention as she seeks connection.
Who is Andrea Bern? When her therapist asks the question, Andrea knows the right things to say: she’s a designer, a friend, a daughter, a sister.
But it’s what she leaves unsaid—she’s alone, a drinker, a former artist, a shrieker in bed, captain of the sinking ship that is her flesh—that feels the most true.
Everyone around her seems to have an entirely different idea of what it means to be an adult: her best friend, Indigo, is getting married; her brother—who miraculously seems unscathed by their shared tumultuous childhood—and sister-in-law are having a hoped-for baby; and her friend Matthew continues to wholly devote himself to making dark paintings at the cost of being flat broke.
But when Andrea’s niece finally arrives, born with a heartbreaking ailment, the Bern family is forced to reexamine what really matters. Will this drive them together or tear them apart?
Told in gut-wrenchingly honest, mordantly comic vignettes, All Grown Up is a breathtaking display of Jami Attenberg’s power as a storyteller, a whip-smart examination of one woman’s life, lived entirely on her own terms.(From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Raised—Buffalo Grove, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., John Hopkins University
• Currently—lives in New Orleans, Louisiana
Jami Attenberg is an American writer of fiction and essays. She grew up in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University with a degree in Writing.
Her early works were published in numerous zines and in a 2003 chapbook called Deli Life. Her first book, Instant Love, a collection of interconnected short stories, was published in 2006. That work has been followed by a series of novels:
2008 - The Kept Man
2010 - The Melting Season
2012 - The Middlesteins
2015 - Saint Mazie
2017 - All Grown Up
2019 - All This Could Be Yours
Attenberg's work has appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, including Nerve and The New York Times. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Adapted from Wikipedia. First retrieved 10/28/2012.)
Book Reviews
All Grown Up is a smart, funny-sad portrait of contemporary urban life in which basic human values seem to have gone awry…. Jami Attenberg is a gifted writer, full of insight and wit, and while her observations are sometimes stark, there’s almost always a comic lift around the corner. She’s created a winning, vulnerable heroine in Andrea although at times you’d like to throttle her. But Andrea’s emotions are always meditated through kindness, and her actions, though at times misdirected, are never cruel. So we root for Andrea to change and grow and find happiness. READ MORE …
Molly Lundqist - LitLovers
[F]or all her foibles and missteps, the grown-up Andrea is primarily sympathetic: funny, honest about her warts-and-all character, dry, all too human, often kind (her treatment of her sister-in-law notwithstanding) and stuck in a place that is far better than the one she came from. To my way of thinking, an unmet opportunity to grow has always equaled tragedy, but here status quo is the goal. It's no easy task to build a novel around a character who doesn't necessarily evolve, or perhaps evolves quietly, with baby steps, on tiptoe, close to the finish line, and maybe, please God, it's not too late. But for all the dark clouds coasting overhead, Attenberg, with her wry sense of humor, manages to entertain and move us nonetheless. Whatever Andrea's objectives are, we're rooting for her.
Helen Schulman - New York Times
All Grown Up is a smart, addictive, hilarious and relevant novel.
Meredith Maran - Washington Post
All Grown Up [is] a smart, funny/sad and unflinchingly honest novel about a single New Yorker.… In sparkling prose, [Attenberg] brings this wonderful character so fully to life that after the book ended, I found myself wishing Andrea well as if she were a good friend and wondering what she would do next.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Andrea, 39, is totally single. No kids, no men, nothing keeping her from living her life to its full potential, which she does. Until her niece is born with a tragic illness, and Andrea's whole family is forced to confront their values, their lifestyles, and their choices. Told in vignettes, All Grown Up asks what happens after you've got the whole "adult" thing under control (Best Books to Read in 2017).
Glamour
Attenberg captures the kaleidoscopic flow of Andrea’s life in spare and witty vignettes that build to a surprising and moving conclusion.
Jane Ciabattari - BBC.com
Bravo to Attenberg, who, with hilarity and honesty, tells the story of an adult woman who wants what she wants, not what she’s supposed to want.
Marie Claire
Thank you, Jami Attenberg, for pushing back against society’s assumptions about what is allowed to matter in our lives. For giving us a different kind of narrative. All Grown Up is not all fluffy and lovely. It turns out that we have other stories—we single people. We human beings.
Bustle
Revolutionary…. [A] perceptive study of love, sacrifice, and what it really means to be an adult.
Tablet
Jami Attenberg deftly travels inside the head of a 39-year-old woman who has no interest in doing what she’s supposed to do and follows her heart instead of her mind—a story that’s sexy, charming, and impossible to put down.
Newsweek
Powerful.… All Grown Up is so intimately [and] sharply observed.
Vogue
Jami Attenberg will have you laughing, cursing, and ranting right along with her book's vibrant main character, Andrea — a 39-year-old single New Yorker trying to figure out how hold her life together. (And trying to figure out what 'having your life together' even means.) This book has got serious spunk.
Bustle
With a satirical voice and astounding pathos, Attenberg’s latest protagonist draws readers into the enthralling and thought-provoking world she inhabits, against the backdrop of an important social conversation about contemporary gender roles.
Harpers Bazaar
[A] bildungsroman with a twist.… The novel’s darkly comic voice is a delight to read, capturing Andrea’s sharp insights as well as her self-destructiveness, while brief chapters that shift back and forth in time effectively convey both the chaos and the stasis of her personal landscape.
Publishers Weekly
Not all the supporting characters are fleshed out, an ailing child is less than a Macguffin, but …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. —Liz French
Library Journal
Attenberg's 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.… Wry, sharp, and profoundly kind; a necessary pleasure.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available: in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for All Grown Up…then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Andrea Bern and, especially, her life as a single woman in New York? Some 50 years after first-wave feminism, is she a throw-back to those early days; in other words, is her choice of being single and childless still "defying convention"?
2. What role has art played in Andrea's life? Why has she forsaken it? What do you think of her fascination, maybe even compulsion, to draw the Empire State Building over and over. Can you think of any symbolic significance her repeated drawing might have?
3. Talk about her relationships to her family. How would describe her upbringing in New York? In what way have those earlier years shaped her present life, left her adrift?
4. Can a case be made for her to abandon her brother and wife when they need her most? Why does it take a year-and-a-half for her to visit them in New Hampshire?
5. Talk about Greta's outpouring of misery when she and Andrea have lunch together at Balthazar. What do you think of Andrea's response? Is she capable of empathy? She reaches out to help a stranger that day but not Greta, who has been always kind to her.
6. Andrea seems to live life on her own terms, unapologetically. Is that something to admire, something to strive for?
7. Read and comment on the passage below: Why does Andrea have a "problem" with what other people accept as a normal, even desirable, outcome in life?
Other people you know 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.
8. Does Andrea evolve toward the end of the novel? Does she grow, learn, mature? Do you end up rooting for her…or not?
9. Jami Attenberg's novel is akin to a series of linked stories. Does that structure appeal to you?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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