All grown up

Review by New York Times 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.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 19, 2017]

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Review by 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

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by 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.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by 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.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book 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.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Apartment   You're in art school, you hate it, you drop out, you move to New York City. For most people, moving to New York City is a gesture of ambition. But for you, it signifies failure, because you grew up there, so it just means you're moving back home after you couldn't make it in the world. Spiritually, it's a reverse commute.      For a while you live downtown with your brother and his girlfriend, in a small spare room, your bed jammed between shoe racks and a few of your brother's guitars in cases plus a wall of books from his girlfriend's undergraduate days at Brown. You get a job, via same girlfriend. You don't hate the job and you don't love the job, but you can't sniff at a hard day's work because you are no better than anyone else, and, in some ways, you are much, much worse. You acknowledge your privilege, and you get to work.      You start making money. You find a small, dusty, crumbling loft in a shitty waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn. It has one floor-to-ceiling window, a tiny Empire State Building in the distance framed beautifully within it. Now you are home. Everyone in your life breathes easier. She's safe now, they all think. At no point does anyone say to you, "So you've stopped making art?" It is because they don't want to know the answer or they don't care or they are scared to ask you because you scare them. Whatever the case, everyone is complicit in this, this new, non-art-making phase of your life. Even though it was the thing you loved most in the world.      But you have a little secret: while you are not making Art anymore you are at least drawing every day. To tell anyone about this would be admitting there is a hole in your life, and you'd rather not say that out loud, except in therapy. But there you are, once a day, drawing the same thing over and over: that goddamned Empire State Building. You get up every morning (or afternoon, on the weekends, depending on the hangover), have a cup of coffee, sit at the card table near the window, and draw it, usually in pencil. If you have time, you'll ink it. Sometimes, if you are running late for work, you do it at night instead, and then you add color to the sketches, to reflect the building's ever-changing lights. Sometimes you draw just the building and sometimes you draw the buildings around it and sometimes you draw the sky and sometimes you draw the bridge in the foreground and sometimes you draw the East River and sometimes you draw the window frame around the whole scene. You have sketchbooks full of these drawings. You could draw the same thing forever, you realize. No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man is a thing you read once. The Empire State Building is your river. And you don't have to leave your apartment to step in it. Art feels safe for you again, even though you know you are not getting any better at it, that the work you are making could be sold to tourists on a sidewalk outside of Central Park on a sunny Saturday and that's about it. That there's no challenge to it, no message, just your view, on repeat. But this is all you can do, this is all you have to offer, and it is just enough to make you feel special.      You do this for six years. Brooklyn apartment in a changing neighborhood, why move when the rent is so cheap? Mediocre but well-paying job at which you excel; you receive a few small promotions. Volunteer work here and there. You march where your activist mother tells you to march. Pointless sketchbooks pile up on the bottom row of a bookshelf. Barely scratching a feverish itch. You also drink plenty and for a long time use, too, coke and ecstasy mainly, although sometimes pills to bring you down at the end of the night. Another way to scratch the itch. There are men also, in your bed, in your world, foggily, but you are less interested in them than in muffling the voice in your head that says you are doing absolutely nothing with your life, that you are a child, that the accoutrements of adulthood are bullshit, they don't mean a goddamn thing, and you are trapped between one place and another and you always will be unless something forces you to change. And also, you miss making art.      Other people you know seem to change quite easily. They 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, and then documenting all of this meticulously on the internet. Really, it appears to be effortless on their part. Their lives are constructed like buildings, each precious but totally unsurprising block stacked before your eyes.      Your favorite thing is when a friend asks to meet you for a drink, a friend you have had a million drinks with in your life, and then, when you get to the bar, your friend stares at the menu and orders nothing, and you are forced to say, "Aren't you drinking?" and she says, "I wish," and she pauses dramatically and you know exactly what's coming next: she's about to tell you she's pregnant. And there is this subtext that you are lucky because you can still drink, and she's unlucky because she can't drink, she has this dumb baby in her. What a stupid fucking baby. In her.      Eventually your brother and his wife get pregnant, and you can't hate on that because it's family, and also they've always been incredibly kind to you, your brother and you particularly bonded because of your father's young demise, an overdose. You throw a baby shower, at which you drink too many mimosas and cry in the bathroom, but you are pretty sure no one notices. It's not that you want a baby, or want to get married, or any of it. It's not your bag. You just feel tired for some reason. Tired of the world. Tired of trying to fit in where you don't. You go home that night and draw the Empire State Building and you feel hopeful doing this thing you love to do, so hopeful you look up online what tonight's colors mean ​-- ​the lights are green and blue ​-- ​and find out it's in honor of National Eating Disorders Day and you get depressed all over again even though you've never had an eating disorder in your life.      Nine months come and go, a baby could be born at any minute. You call your brother to find out when exactly, but they've been using a hippie-dippie midwife and he says, "We don't know yet. Could be another week." You are suddenly aswirl with enthusiasm. It's going to be a girl. "Call me whenever you hear anything, anything at all," you tell him. Then you have three intensely dull, soul-deadening afternoon meetings in a row and after that you are moved to a new cube, which you must share with a freshly hired coworker who is thirteen years younger than you and is hilarious and loud and pretty and is probably making half of what you make but still spends it all on tight dresses. It is a Friday. You go out for drinks in your neighborhood. You get lit. Then you call your dealer, whom you haven't called in a few years. You can't believe the number still works. He says, "It's been a while since we last met." You say, "I've been busy," as if you need to justify why you're not doing drugs anymore. You don't buy that much, just enough, but then you meet a man at the bar ​-- ​you both pretend you've met before although you haven't, but it just feels safer that way for some reason ​-- ​and he has more than enough for the two of you. Then you go home together, to your place, to tiny Manhattan in the window, to the piles of sketchbooks, and the two of you proceed to do all the drugs. This goes on for hours. There's a little bit of sex involved but neither one of you is that interested in each other. Drug buddies, that's about it. You can't even get it up to get it up. Eventually he leaves, and you turn off your phone and go to sleep. You wake up on Sunday night. You turn on your phone. There are eight messages from your brother and your mother. You have missed your niece being born. Excerpted from All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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