Jami Attenberg writes Smart, funny novels about dysfunctional familiesShe has much to share about her work in her memoir. “I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home” (Ecco, 272 pp., ★★★ out of four, out Tuesday). But it’s not a writing guide. She recalls feeling lost when someone tried to get career advice. All she can offer is her opinion. “the intangible, the accidental, the breaks and the heartbreaks, and the nurturing.”
She also writes plenty about her travels – book-tour stops, writer’s residencies, jaunts in Asia and Europe. But she’s too much in her own head to deliver a typical travelogue. Even when she’s exploring – catacombs in Italy, Holocaust memorials in Lithuania – she’s mindful of her career’s forward momentum. Waylaid in a snowstorm in Wyoming she worries about her future. “‘She died on the road,’ I wrote, in my head. ‘And no one had even bought her book.’”
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Call “All This Way”A memoir of restlessness. Attenberg’s Midwestern upbringing made her impatient for escape. She was an editor and felt the need to tell her own stories. Her first novels were unsuccessful in the marketplace and she knew that she wanted to continue her work. Burnout, loneliness, a drug habit and a persistent sense of dissatisfaction almost inevitably ensued.
She’s come out well from those experiences with bestselling novels, a stable perch in New Orleans and an affectionate fan base. (Her “1000 Words of Summer”The writing-motivation project was a success in the post-pandemic era. So “All This Way”She has a self-deprecating, look back-and-laugh attitude. She recalls how she endured the most bizarre parts of her starving-artist days. From low-attended readings to the boyfriend who surprised and surprised her with a sexual toy. (“Why couldn’t it have been a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead? Here, I brought you a snack!”)
Her restlessness was also a bone-deep thing, and Attenberg is at her strongest when she’s writing deep into that physical experience. Attenberg was a groper and a sexy woman who walked on trains in Europe, so she wore a man’s costume for a while. A sexual assault in college by a fellow aspiring writer prompts a lacerating chapter on storytelling, unbalanced male and female writing reputations, and the pressure to suppress stories – ironically, in a writing environment. She doesn’t expect a speech invite from her alma mater, but, she snaps, “if they asked me back now, I would read this chapter.”
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“All This Way” is constructed from various personal essays she’s written in recent years, which gives it a loose, sometimes ungainly feel. Rather than shape her childhood, career milestones, or stints in Brooklyn and New Orleans into an arc, she’s content to let the stitches show. But when her writing is at its liveliest, the book’s looseness just feels on-brand. Attenberg would consider it dishonest to be dishonest about writing, and living, in general.
“The thing with being a novelist – or really with any creative endeavor – is we have to willingly enter into the not knowing,”She writes. The consequences of the not-knowing were painful. But it’s clear that’s how the work got done.
