All Grown Up

Told in a series of short stories/vignettes, All Grown Up gives us a portrait of disaffected, self-absorbed New Yorker Andrea who is a failed-but-never-really-tried artist, hates her job, fires her therapist, fights with her mother, sleeps around, drinks too much, and thinks too much. Andrea is annoying and self-centered, afraid to make real connections with people, but so adrift in her own life, she can't see the source of her own unhappiness. It would be easy to hate Andrea, and I kind of did - but I also liked her and felt for her, and I think it's a credit to Attenberg's skill that she could successfully draw such a character.

I almost feel like I shouldn't have liked this book. It focuses on the life of an art school dropout who works for an advertising firm in New York City, drinks too much, navel-gazes a lot, sleep a with a lot of completely unsuitable men, and feels generally unfulfilled with her life and her single status. Not the sort of person I generally find interesting or easy to empathize with in a novel. But, damn it, Jami Attenberg makes me care about her, and relate to her, and feel for her. It's something in the writing, I think. The writing is terrific. It's a very clean style, nothing that feels fancy, but the words are all perfectly chosen and it's a delight to read. Which seems a bit odd to say, because the protagonist's life, in general, show more is not a happy one. But it is, anyway. And, in the end, it left me with a beautiful, painful knot of emotion in my stomach, which was unexpected and impressive.

The structure is odd, because each chapter reads like its own tiny short story, with facts we already knew about from past chapters re-explained or characters re-introduced as if we might never have seen them before. It sounds as if it should be annoying, but it works. It doesn't feel repetitive, but rather as if we're seeing aspects of the main character's life in a relevant new context each time. And the end result very much does feel like it adds up to a novel.

I doubt I would ever have picked this one up on my own initiative -- I got it from a book subscription service -- but I'm really, really glad I read it. show less

A really appealing narrative voice. The novel takes place chronologically back and forth from the 80s when she was a kid. According to NYT rave from Helen Schulman, "her prime achievement in midlife seems to be successfully treading water without further emotional injury — and it is a hard-won stasis. A former art student, she said goodbye to all that when the going got rough. A former sexual libertine, she has gradually and willfully gained control over whom she goes to bed with. A reformed drug abuser and out-of-control drinker, Andrea arranges a date with a man she has met online and it goes about the way you’d expect. “Although there’s a certain pleasure I take in not being the one who drinks too much,” she says, “it’s show more only momentary, because I still have to contend with a drunk,” a line I found both sad and funny." Me, too, and, as they say, it resonated.
The part about the very ill niece didn't generate enough interest or empathy in me making the family parts a little forced, i.e. lunch with sister-in-law or some of the conversations with her mom. But I flew on through in the company of an appealing if confused narrator. Includes a trip to Seattle for a wedding. show less

What does it mean to be a grown up? Is it having a job and your own apartment? Is it being in a stable relationship? Is it getting married and having kids? Or is is something less tangible like having a plan, liking yourself, being emotionally content? Do you get to measure it yourself or must you rely on others' judgment that you are, in fact, all grown up? As my children reach legal adulthood and venture out in the world, these are questions I ask more and more. Jami Attenberg's short novel, All Grown Up, also asks and attempts to answer just these questions.

Andrea is turning 40. That's certainly old enough to be considered "all grown up," but is she? She has a decent job that she hates, still mourning the loss of her dream of an art show more career. Her romantic relationships are awful, often one-offs, casual, and disengaged. She's emotionally unavailable to friends and family. She drinks too much, dabbles with drugs, is pretty insufferable and self-centered, and is definitely still trying to figure out who she is and what she wants from life. All she knows is that she doesn't want the life others have settled into and so she can be dismissive of other's choices and their definitions of being an adult. Andrea lives in an apartment with a good view, at least until another building goes up and blocks the view entirely, leaving her trapped in a formerly good apartment, much as she's trapped in a disappointing life.

This is a novel in vignettes, a character study of Andrea. It is non-chronological, jumping around from her teen years to the present to build a picture of why Andrea is the way that she is. What she is is deeply dysfunctional and only starting to figure things out at the end of the novel as she holds the tiny, cold hand of her terminally ill niece. There isn't much of a plot and the story is tenuously held together, perhaps because of the narrative structure. And while this is billed as a book about a woman who is single and childless by choice, it comes off rather as if these things happened to her out of apathy rather than active decision making on her part. In the end, maybe being a grown up is changing the things about life that make you unhappy, making choices that will lead you toward the existence you've been moaning about not having, and being emotionally forgiving and available to your loved one, friends, and family. Has Andrea learned this? Hard to say. Long before the end of the novel and any potential, hinted at change, I was tired of Andrea and her one note life. It would have been better if I had been able to feel sorry for her. Instead, I just didn't care about her at all. This book seems to be pretty polarizing though so perhaps you'll be one of the people who loves it. show less

In these clever, savvy linked stories within the shroud of family illness, Jami Attenberg does a fine job of inserting us into the life of Andrea Bern. Frustrated painter, advertising whiz, conflicted daughter, Andrea never quite recovers from the overdose death of her father. A day spent with him playing hooky from school solidifies his charismatic hold on her. Her always tenuous relationship with her mother, who had to take drastic measures to support the family, is also a constant, amusing challenge. And, as will all young people in the throes of a NY/Brooklyn life, Andrea takes and discards lovers and friends, and is taken and discarded herself. So well told, and so rewarding when the disparate threads weave towards the end of a show more life and of the stories. Highly recommended. show less

Living the Imperfect Life

If you are an artist, but you can’t create art. If you have sex but can’t get into love and commitment. If you have a family but you can’t acknowledge you love them and wish to be part of their lives. If you know from experience and from your childhood that alcohol and drugs will hurt you but you use them anyway. If you get a good paying job as a designer in advertising and you hate but keep it just because it pays. If you do all these things (and, really, who doesn’t do a few of them?), aren’t you just passing through life? And, if you are anything like Andrea Bern, Jami Attenberg’s sharp witted protagonist, you obsess on these things, on your meandering and stumbling journey to age forty.

It will show more probably come as no surprise to anybody that the vast majority of reviewers, professional and avid reader types, are women. But this doesn’t mean that All Grown Up is what the trade calls Chic Lit. Readers will not find the typical wacky, iconoclastic woman here (though Andrea certainly seems that way, at first), but rather, someone trying to sort out her life, without much success. She claims to know what’s wrong, but does she? If she does, why doesn’t she fix the wrongs? There is no neat, tied-with-a-bow ending here.

Nor does it mean that it’s a novel men won’t enjoy and maybe learn from. Men, generally, even male novelists, don’t do a lot of baring of the soul of the type you’ll find in this novel (though sometimes they do, as in Chris Bachelder’s very good The Throwback Special), and usually aren’t comfortable with the level of introspection and self-knowledge on exhibition in Andrea. You know, maybe they should be. Maybe reading Attenberg’s novel would be a good experience a type of emotional liberation. And it helps that Attenberg is a terrific writer, terrific with The Middlesteins, and as terrific here with a novel about a woman who knows and doesn’t know herself. show less

Living the Imperfect Life

If you are an artist, but you can’t create art. If you have sex but can’t get into love and commitment. If you have a family but you can’t acknowledge you love them and wish to be part of their lives. If you know from experience and from your childhood that alcohol and drugs will hurt you but you use them anyway. If you get a good paying job as a designer in advertising and you hate but keep it just because it pays. If you do all these things (and, really, who doesn’t do a few of them?), aren’t you just passing through life? And, if you are anything like Andrea Bern, Jami Attenberg’s sharp witted protagonist, you obsess on these things, on your meandering and stumbling journey to age forty.

It will show more probably come as no surprise to anybody that the vast majority of reviewers, professional and avid reader types, are women. But this doesn’t mean that All Grown Up is what the trade calls Chic Lit. Readers will not find the typical wacky, iconoclastic woman here (though Andrea certainly seems that way, at first), but rather, someone trying to sort out her life, without much success. She claims to know what’s wrong, but does she? If she does, why doesn’t she fix the wrongs? There is no neat, tied-with-a-bow ending here.

Nor does it mean that it’s a novel men won’t enjoy and maybe learn from. Men, generally, even male novelists, don’t do a lot of baring of the soul of the type you’ll find in this novel (though sometimes they do, as in Chris Bachelder’s very good The Throwback Special), and usually aren’t comfortable with the level of introspection and self-knowledge on exhibition in Andrea. You know, maybe they should be. Maybe reading Attenberg’s novel would be a good experience a type of emotional liberation. And it helps that Attenberg is a terrific writer, terrific with The Middlesteins, and as terrific here with a novel about a woman who knows and doesn’t know herself. show less