Jami Attenberg memoir shares the joy, heartbreak of the writer’s life
Jami Attenberg writes smart, brassy novels about dysfunctional families, and she has a lot to say about her work in her memoir, “I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home” (Ecco). But it’s not a writing guide. She recalls being at a loss when someone tries to extract career advice. All she has to offer is “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 by a snowstorm in Wyoming, she despairs her future. “‘She died on the road,’ I wrote, in my head. ‘And no one had even bought her book.’”
Call “All This Way” a memoir of restlessness then. Attenberg’s Midwestern upbringing made her impatient for escape. Working as a copywriter made her crave telling her own stories. Watching her earliest novels struggle in the marketplace made her desperate to say yes to any opportunity to keep working. 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” writing-motivation project has been a pandemic-era success.) So “All This Way” often has a selfdeprecating, look-back-and-laugh feel, as she recalls enduring the most absurd parts of her starving-artist days, from low-attended readings to the pushy boyfriend who surprised her with a sex 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
Author Jami Attenberg.
Attenberg is at her strongest when she’s writing deep into that physical experience. Leering, groping men on trains across Europe prompted her to dress as a man for a time. 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.”
“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. Tidiness, for Attenberg, would be dishonest about writing in particular 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 not knowing left scars. But it’s clear that’s how the work got done.