All This Could Be Yours
Jami Attenberg, 2019
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH Books)
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544824256
Summary
A novel of family secrets: think the drama of Big Little Lies set in the heat of a New Orleans summer.
“If I know why they are the way they are, then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am,” says Alex Tuchman of her parents.
Now that her father is on his deathbed, Alex—a strong-headed lawyer, devoted mother, and loving sister—feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who Victor is and what he did over the course of his life and career. (A power-hungry real estate developer, he is, by all accounts, a bad man.)
She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra.
As Barbra fends off Alex’s unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous life with Victor. Meanwhile Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, buying up all the lipstick in drug stores around New Orleans and bursting into crying fits.
Dysfunction is at its peak. As each family member grapples with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward—with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children.
All This Could Be Yours is a timely, piercing exploration of what it means to be caught in the web of a toxic man who abused his power; it shows how those webs can tangle a family for generations and what it takes to—maybe, hopefully—break free.
With her signature "sparkling prose" (Marie Claire) and incisive wit, Jami Attenberg deftly explores one of the most important subjects of our age. (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
Attenberg gets so deep into the psyches of her characters that the story ends up seeming electric with ruin, and with possible resurrection…. This is how you write a very good novel about a very bad man…. All This Could Be Yours is full of hope… [but] most powerful when it’s honest… [about how difficult hope is] in the first place.
New York Times
With her sixth novel, Jami Attenberg… ecures her place as an oddly sparkling master of warped family sagas…. All This Could Be Yours is orchestrated with the precision of an opera on a revolving stage.
NPR
Attenberg is a master at excavating the good, the bad and the ugly truths about families, and in this short but potent novel, her richly human characters populate a witty narrative studded with surprises.
People
Told from multiple perspectives, All This Could Be Yours illustrates the heartbreak, isolation and chaos that comes from really getting to know your family.
Time
Attenberg… doesn’t flinch from digging into life’s messiness…. [Her] medium… is familial dysfunction. And the Tuchman family is a matryoshka stacking doll of dysfunction. [This is] an emotionally messy novel, but precise in craft. The narrative voice is complex and profound.
USA Today
Attenberg is on a roll…. Like a little chili pepper in the chocolate, that particular kind of dark laughter is Attenberg’s secret ingredient.
Newsday
(Starred review) A patriarch’s death strains a family’s already fraught relationships in this dazzling novel…. Attenberg excels at revealing rich interior lives—in her main cast and cameo characters—in direct, lucid prose. This is a delectable family saga.
Publishers Weekly
[A] whirling dervish of a novel.… Attenberg is a master of subtlety as she divulges everyone's thoughts…. The unusual twist here is that readers learn all their stories while the characters do not. Contemporary family sagas don't get much better. —Stacy Alesi, Eugene M. & Christine E. Lynn Lib., Lynn Univ., Boca Raton,
Library Journal
(Starred review) Weaving together a riotous assortment of threads, Attenberg tenderly mines [the Tuchmans’] family history and massive dysfunction…. Her characters… inner lives coalesce beautifully into a funny and heart-stirring tribute to the nutty inscrutability of belonging to a family.
Booklist
(Starred review) Prickly and unsentimental, but never quite hopeless, Attenberg, poet laureate of difficult families, captures the relentlessly lonely beauty of being alive. Not a gentle novel but a deeply tender one.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the damage Victor Tuchman has inflicted on his family. The details are parceled out, piece by piece, character by character: why might Jami Attenberg have used this particular narrative technique rather than reveal the damage outright?
2. What kind of person is Victor? How would you describe him? Even more important, what kind of people has his cruelty created?
3. Consider each of the family members: Barbara, Victor's wife; Gary, the son, who remains in Los Angeles; and Alex, the daughter. What are your thoughts about each of the characters: do they elicit your sympathy, pity, admiration, dislike, impatience?
4. Alex, on the treadmill in her hotel (unpack that symbol!) "loathed herself, forgave herself. She loathed them, she did not forgive them. She ran." But then the scene ends with Alex raising her arms in supposed "victory." Why "victory"?
5. Barbara accepted a devil's bargain: She'd keep [Victor's] secrets and ask for nothing but objects." Why had she remained with Victor over the years? To what extent is she culpable, or not, in Victor's behavior?
6. Gary, in L.A., is receiving a massage for his troublesome neck pain, which he labels Twyla, in his wife's honor. He thinks, "I'm garbage." Why?
7. Speaking of Twyla, how would you describe her … and the couple's marriage? Why is Twyla so unnerved? Why has her in-laws' move to New Orleans disrupted her contented life with Gary and their daughter Avery?
8. Do you have hope for Alex, Barbara, Gary, and Twyla? Are they capable of change—can they become different people once he dies? All of which brings up a question posed by the novel: if you can't forget, can you forgive? (What's the difference… is there a difference?)
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)