Available:*
Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction | FIC ATTENBER JAM | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Chowchilla Branch (Madera Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Fiction Shelves | FIC ATTENBERG | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Clovis Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | ATTENBE JA All_gro | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Coalinga District Library (Coalinga-Huron) | Searching... Unknown | Fiction Area | F ATT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Kern River Valley Branch (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction | FIC ATTENBER JAM | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Visalia Library (Tulare Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Fiction Area | FIC ATTENBER JAMI | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Middlesteins comes 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.
Author Notes
JAMI ATTENBERG is the New York Times best-selling 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.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Attenberg's (Saint Mazie) new novel is a bildungsroman with a twist, adapting a coming-of-age narrative to a protagonist who is not as young as her immaturity sometimes suggests. In her 30s, New Yorker Andrea Bern is a gifted artist whose talents don't quite extend to mastering adulthood as those around her understand it. While her friends dedicate themselves to building families or careers and her brother and sister-in-law cope with a terminally ill child, Andrea seems stuck in a holding pattern. She abandons the art making she loves, clings to a dead-end job, and embraces drinking and rote sexual encounters; though not making much headway, she sees a therapist for nearly a decade in an attempt to grapple with inner wounds, notably the overdose death of her musician father in the family apartment when she was 13. 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. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FORGIVE ME, JAMI ATTENBERG, but I read your new novel, "All Grown Up" - attentively, in a single gulp - on the same day that Mary Tyler Moore died, and now I can't help bemoaning the one-step-forward, two-steps-backward progress of the second-wave feminism I was brought up on. Moore's famous television character Mary Richards was an icon of the 1970 s, dealing with issues of career, sexuality, reproductive rights and her status as a single woman in a society that wasn't necessarily comfortable with single women. (She made $50 a week less than her male predecessor, and I still recall that when she put it to her boss, Mr. Grant, by asking him why, he replied, "Because he was a man," as if she were daft.) Remember the original lyrics to her theme song? How will you make it on your own?... Girl, this time you're all alone. We were all rooting for Mary. And she was a hero to girls like me. I firmly believed that when I grew up I would be free to live how I pleased, married or not, with children or not, with a career, without censure. (I also believed, more recently, that a brilliant, experienced, competent female presidential candidate would handily win the election - so you can judge the resiliency of my naïveté as you like.) I don't know what wave feminism we are in now. Fourth? Fifth? But Ms. Attenberg, it depresses me to no end that the gritty, credible, less kissed-by-God heroine of your book, Andrea Bern, a single, childless, 39-year-old straight woman, a character created almost 50 years after Mary Richards, is still realistically struggling with and defying convention because she isn't married. (And in spite of everything, probably only earning 78 cents to the male dollar.) Arrgh. Andrea is a product of her times too; she's younger than I am, although she grew up in a 1980s New York City that I recognize, and is scarred by the lackadaisical urban parenting style of that era. Her story moves back and forth in time, in small vignettes, so we see her from middle school to middle age, although not in any particular chronological order. Unlike the spunky Mary, who was bound to her career as a television news producer by passion, Andrea works in advertising, where the meetings are "intensely dull, soul-deadening," and where she wiggles her way out of a big promotion because it would be too much of a commitment. In fact, 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 only momentary, because I still have to contend with a drunk," a line I found both sad and funny. These small victories, sometimes amusing, sometimes costly, are crucial to Andrea's survival. As the years pass, she gets a few minor-league raises at her boring job, buys furniture and wineglasses, pays off her debt. There's more than some satisfaction in this - Andrea has a life, and a fragile independence from her family of origin, the wellspring of her troubles and her only consistent source of love. Attenberg is most famously the author of "The Middlesteins," and like this new novel (her sixth), the earlier book is in part about choosing to save yourself even if that means letting down someone who really needs you. I like this book better - it's less familiar (some of the descriptions of Jewish suburbia in "The Middlesteins" felt typecast to me) and the tone less bouncy, more emotionally resonant. There are some fascinating examinations of the shifting culture as filtered through Andrea's various iterations: the art student, hungry for approval; the single woman at her best friend's side, feeling more warmly toward this TriBeCa yummy-mummy now that her financier husband has ditched her and their baby, somehow evening out the score. Andrea as a child, when her heroin-addicted father overdoses in their living room chair while listening to jazz. Andrea as a teenager, at one of her widowed mother's all-male rent-raising dinners, where the horny guests would sometimes pull her onto their laps. The narrative zigzag through time lets us know what Andrea has been up against - no wholesomely raised Mary Richards she - and builds a case for her to abandon her brother and his wife when they need her most, as they care for their terminally ill daughter on some inherited property up in New Hampshire. This is also the thing that passes in the largest sense for plot in "All Grown Up": Will she or won't she be able to come through for this beleaguered (and formerly glamorous) young couple? In perpetual parental limbo, they eat and gain weight and do almost nothing else out in the country, waiting mostly for their child to die. For a year and a half, Andrea does not visit. In one of the most disturbing sequences, Greta, the sister-in-law, takes a rare trip to New York from her painful exile up north. She invites Andrea to lunch at Balthazar, an expensive faux-Parisian brasserie, and there she unloads her misery and pain, her fears about money, her marriage, just about everything - the horrific limbo of caring for a daughter who will never grow. The information she imparts is for Andrea "both worrisome and boring." This is the first time she's seen Greta since dropping her mother off to live with the besieged parents in the country and help with their burden. "I just figured they were doing their thing, being this tight little family unit in the woods. Once they were all here, now they are all there, and I'm the one who got left behind." With this scene, Attenberg changes the game. Suddenly, Andrea's tightrope walk of functionality feels more like narcissism than necessity. She reaches out to a stranger in need that day, but not to Greta, the person who has been the most loving and generous to her - perhaps because the emotions are too hot? I'm not sure. Andrea is challenged in a crucial way to be compassionate to someone who has always been compassionate to her, and it is a challenge she seemingly, at least in this sequence, can't meet. It's intriguingly provocative on Attenberg's part to make a protagonist this insensitive and, dare I say it, immature. But for 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. Girl, you're gonna make it after all. ? The heroine's family is the wellspring of her troubles and her only steady source of love. HELEN schulman is the author of five novels and the founder of WriteOnNYC.com, a nonprofit group that provides writing teachers to underserved children.
Guardian Review
This single-woman-about-town fiction is not like Sex and the City or Bridget Jones's Diary -- it is a warts-and-all portrait of independence The blurb for Jami Attenberg 's fifth novel, about a single, childless 39-year-old New Yorker, makes it sound like ideal reading for a 40-year-old, childless, London-based book reviewer. The novel, we are promised, will pose such questions as "What if I don't want to hold your baby?" "Can I date you without ever hearing about your divorce?" and "Why does everybody keep asking me why I'm not married?" So far, so Carrie Bradshaw? Maybe, but that's where the similarity ends. If All Grown Up is like any recent single-woman-about-town fiction, it is not Sex and the City or Bridget Jones's Diary, but Phoebe Waller-Bridge's darkly comic series Fleabag, which appeared on BBC3 last year, with its solitary, uncompromising heroine, her damaged past gradually revealed, and her knowing looks to camera. The literature of sex and the single woman has been in the doldrums since Carrie got married and Bridget had her baby, so three cheers for this warts-and-all portrait of a woman trying to find her place in the world and in her own nuclear family now she is all grown up. Attenberg's novels include 2015's Saint Mazie, whose heroine lived life on her own terms, and 2012's The Middlesteins, about a family falling apart. Andrea has qualities of both: she's an independent single woman with a well-paid job that bores her, an often hilarious sex life, and a family in crisis. Her drug-addicted father died when she was a child. Her mother made ends meet by inviting men round for "dinner parties". Andrea's brother and his wife have a little girl who is dying. Andrea avoids the issue, until her mother moves out to New Hampshire to be with them. "I'm the sick baby, I think. Me. Who will hold me?" This heroine is difficult, selfish and sometimes cruel -- as most real-life heroines are. There is much humour, though, as Andrea navigates grown-up life. "This is not a date", she says about one drunken encounter, "this is an audition for a play about a terrible date." A friend offers Andrea her beautiful new baby to hold to cheer her up. "I would rather have a glass of wine," Andrea thinks. An old acquaintance has "the intensity of a squirrel". Another "a ponytail the colour of rotting lemons". There is a book, Andrea writes, "about being single, written by an extremely attractive woman who is now married, and it is a critical yet wistful remembrance of her uncoupled days. I have no interest in reading this book. I am already single. I have been single a long time. There is nothing this book can teach me about being single that I don't already know. Regardless, everyone I know tells me about this book." This is no such book: neither a critical view of tragic singledom, nor a sentimentalising of cocktails, gossip and girls' nights in. This is a novel about how to step up when your smug married friend suddenly gets divorced, or when your annoying mum really needs you; about "being there" for people when you don't even know where "there" is. It has hope, in spades. Andrea refers to a good friend, who seems to have it all sussed out. "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, 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." - Katy Guest.
Kirkus Review
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" successan engagement, a husband, a babyAndrea 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, specificallyneither marriage nor babies is her "bag," anywayso 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 vignettesthey fly by if you let them, though they deserve to be savoredthe 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Attenberg's (The Middlesteins) latest novel features a character that is anything but grown up. While this may be an attempt at humor, the nonchronological look at Andrea Bern's self-absorbed life is full of drugs, alcohol, and uncommitted relationships. She has quit art after throwing herself at the feet of an art instructor, bemoans lost friendships, and ignores her own family and her terminally ill niece. The other characters are like subway stops in her life, but they often are more multidimensional than is Andrea. Mia Barron gives a solid reading of the novel, but that may not be enough for any listener who isn't a devoted fan of the author. Verdict A disappointing effort. ["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": LJ 2/15/17 review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.