[Attenberg] brings to the subject her gifts as a novelist: a fierce impulse toward honesty, a companionably cranky voice and an interest in the complicated, bobbing and weaving ways in which people navigate their desires. . . . Her voice and her frankness lead the way through what can sometimes feel like a maze — but the satisfactions are thick on the ground, and we follow. And when we are finished, we hold in our hands the promised ending, the book itself.
I Came All This Way to Meet You details the highs and lows of finding yourself through your work and living a creative life—it’s a thrill for superfans and newcomers alike.
To say this book was a delight to read is putting it lightly.
"I Came All This Way to Meet You—which features the shining prose that characterizes Attenberg's fiction, while allowing us a glimpse behind the curtain of her process and her personal history—is one of the most artistically invigorating books I've read in years. It made me want to sit down and write."
[Attenberg’s] writing…shimmers with keen pragmatic observations as well as deeply perceptible humane empathy . . . I Came All This Way to Meet You is a book about the making of a writer in the best possible way – accessible, funny, illuminating. It’s a book about kindness and grief, joy and forgiveness, failures, challenges, mistakes, and hope. It’s also a terrific ode to good art and true friendship.
Reading Jami Attenberg is like hanging out with a friend who encourages you— through their own example—to be your messy, vibrant, glorious self. Attenberg’s voice is equal parts wise auntie and wise-ass, whether on social media or in any of her seven increasingly well-received novels."
[A] fierce memoir of personal transformation.
Ultimately, her memoir is about what it is like not to have, nor even much to want, all the things that are supposed to make a woman complete. . . . [Attenberg’s] memoir is, in other words, a powerful antidote to pernicious fantasies of the tulle-skirt-and-soya-latte kind. . . . She’s very funny, and it’s this that makes her marvelous.
[A] fierce memoir of personal transformation.
Remarkable...It’s overwhelming, beautiful stuff, though always full of living, just as effective on love and promise...At some point, [Attenberg] picks up Just Kids, Patti Smith’s rightly-praised, luminescent classic about being young and brave in the New York of the early 1970s, and you can feel Attenberg revving and spinning outward from there, into a similar kind of messy, glorious ramble that also unfolds in New York (she lives for years in Brooklyn), but then New Orleans, Sicily, small bookstores across the West and most compellingly, her Midwestern youth."
10/18/2021
Novelist Attenberg (All Grown Up) meditates on the virtues and vices of an unscripted life in this sparkling memoir. In vivid essays, Attenberg recalls her couch-surfing years in her 20s, an assault she survived in college (“That moment remains a burning hot coal in my chest”), and teaching fiction in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a “newly moderately successful writer” in 2013. She writes of her decision to eschew tradition in pursuit of art and adventure, but how, at age 40, she began to envy her more grounded, married friends: “I did not want... the husband, the kids. But I did want that refrigerator full of food.” The tension between rootedness and wanderlust makes for brisk descriptions of locale: from Brooklyn on the cusp of gentrification, where she “had birthdays... and went broke several times,” to New Orleans, where she wrote “religiously, daily,” to a chapel made of bones in Portugal. Though her narrative flits around in time and space, her writing emerges as a bedrock from which to both grow and settle into. From the vantage point of 2020, she observes: “We are all homebound.... We can’t go back to the same way.... Everything is just sideways.” Tilted or upright, Attenberg’s story shines with wit and empathy. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jan.)
[A] fierce memoir of personal transformation.” — USA Today
“I Came All This Way to Meet You details the highs and lows of finding yourself through your work and living a creative life—it’s a thrill for superfans and newcomers alike.” — Vogue
“Remarkable...It’s overwhelming, beautiful stuff, though always full of living, just as effective on love and promise...At some point, [Attenberg] picks up Just Kids, Patti Smith’s rightly-praised, luminescent classic about being young and brave in the New York of the early 1970s, and you can feel Attenberg revving and spinning outward from there, into a similar kind of messy, glorious ramble that also unfolds in New York (she lives for years in Brooklyn), but then New Orleans, Sicily, small bookstores across the West and most compellingly, her Midwestern youth." — Chicago Tribune
“[Attenberg’s] writing…shimmers with keen pragmatic observations as well as deeply perceptible humane empathy . . . I Came All This Way to Meet You is a book about the making of a writer in the best possible way – accessible, funny, illuminating. It’s a book about kindness and grief, joy and forgiveness, failures, challenges, mistakes, and hope. It’s also a terrific ode to good art and true friendship.” — Boston Globe
“[Attenberg] brings to the subject her gifts as a novelist: a fierce impulse toward honesty, a companionably cranky voice and an interest in the complicated, bobbing and weaving ways in which people navigate their desires. . . . Her voice and her frankness lead the way through what can sometimes feel like a maze — but the satisfactions are thick on the ground, and we follow. And when we are finished, we hold in our hands the promised ending, the book itself.” — Claire Dederer, New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
“Attenberg’s willingness to engage with the vulnerability that comes with leading a creative life . . . is so remarkable. She is refreshingly candid about what it really means to be a writer and to believe in a calling.” — Time (A Must Read Book of 2022)
When Attenberg writes about the past, she does so with the kind of hindsight and self-awareness only possible after deep reflection over events in your life countless times over and from varying — conflicting, even — angles.
[F]eels like a perfect read for January
[Attenberg’s] frank and charming writing creates an intimacy with the reader. A fantastic choice for those who love writers’ memoirs, such as Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.
A remarkable memoir I’ll be re-reading forever.
I recommend I Came All This Way to Meet You by Jami Attenberg. As the daughter of a traveling salesman, Jami Attenberg was born to hit the road. In this memoir, she discusses how her wanderings have impacted her writing and vice versa. It’s a beautifully written, thought-provoking exploration of how one writer found her voice.
“I Came All This Way To Meet You showcases all the very best of Jami Attenberg’s gifts, bringing intimacy to the forefront of the work, asking the reader to stay close, pay attention, to learn. The book is an embrace, a love letter to work and to friendship.
This stunning work explores home not solely as geographic place but also as a mobile metaphor for the relationships we consistently run to and away from. Jami Attenberg cements her place as one of our greatest, most agile writers.”
I Came All This Way To Meet You is a love story; it shows us a way to love art and our lives and our souls...It’s Eat Pray Love for Nick Cave fans."
"A wise and witty glimpse behind the travels and travails of one of our most beloved contemporary novelists. I Came All This Way To Meet You brims with humor, humility, pathos, and intelligence. I gulped down every page and finished sated, as if I'd spent a long weekend with a dear friend."
[Attenberg’s] frank and charming writing creates an intimacy with the reader. A fantastic choice for those who love writers’ memoirs, such as Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.
★ 12/01/2021
In this latest work, novelist Attenberg (The Middlesteins; Saint Mazie) bravely shares the many lives she has lived at once—jobs held, identities navigated, homes left and returned to, hopes lost and found—all in order to support and sustain herself as a writer. She weaves together stories from her childhood with moments of raw self-examination and social critique in ways that pull her readers close to her, while always reminding them that they cannot truly share in the struggle, the fight that makes her stories so urgent. Readers follow along as she traces her path to becoming a writer, from shelving books at a local college library in her native California, to teaching fiction in Lithuania, where she began to explore her own personal family history as the descendent of Russian immigrants. Her memoir is a travelogue of sorts, taking her to Germany and Italy and more, as she navigates friendships, relationships, and her own writing career. VERDICT What Attenberg has learned about being a writer and a human offers a valuable lesson for readers seeking wholeness, healing, self-expression, and strength. The result is a humorous memoir of transformation that will delight a range of readers.—Emily Bowles, Lawrence Univ., WI
Xe Sands’s inviting midrange voice and wry, reflective tone harmonize well with novelist Jami Attenberg’s memoir. Writing in the form of linked essays, Attenberg, now in her 40s, considers the benefits and drawbacks of her unscripted and spontaneous approach to life. About a trip to Europe, for example, she writes, “There were cheap direct flights from New Orleans to Frankfurt. All the borders were open. I clicked. I did not think twice about it. I would go wherever I wanted.” Sands performs with her usual clarity, often with a hint of a smile. To these she adds a subtly offhand quality that’s attuned to Attenberg’s approach, which is lighthearted despite life’s challenges, and insightful without brooding. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Xe Sands’s inviting midrange voice and wry, reflective tone harmonize well with novelist Jami Attenberg’s memoir. Writing in the form of linked essays, Attenberg, now in her 40s, considers the benefits and drawbacks of her unscripted and spontaneous approach to life. About a trip to Europe, for example, she writes, “There were cheap direct flights from New Orleans to Frankfurt. All the borders were open. I clicked. I did not think twice about it. I would go wherever I wanted.” Sands performs with her usual clarity, often with a hint of a smile. To these she adds a subtly offhand quality that’s attuned to Attenberg’s approach, which is lighthearted despite life’s challenges, and insightful without brooding. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
2021-08-31
A novelist at midlife takes stock of her personal history and accomplishments.
In this extended reflection, Attenberg offers fans of her fiction the opportunity to get to know her more intimately. "I own these words. I own these ideas. Here is my book." With these sentences, the prologue to the author’s debut memoir closes on a note of anxious self-assertion that becomes more pronounced as the narrative progresses. A loose chronicle of her jobs, homes, and travels, the book is divided into three parts that cover similar ground chronologically. Attenberg mentions several friendships with other writers—some warmly, other less so. "Writers meet for drinks for different reasons," she explains, recalling an essayist who arranged a meeting to ferret out the secret of her success with a book that appears to be The Middlesteins (2012)—though her novels are not named in this book. Attenberg criticizes the other writer for wanting to pick her brain “as if [it] were a carryout salad.” Later, after receiving a copy of Olive Kitteridge, she writes, “we receive so much from other writers when they show us how it's done….We must chew on the words of others.” In another passage, Attenberg remembers a college classmate who was at first a friend but then assaulted her; the man had recently committed suicide. "Then I read a status update on Facebook by someone who had been in our writing program,” she writes, “and he mourned him and said, ‘He was the best writer in our class,’ and I wanted to fucking scream, because I was the best writer in our class.” At the end, Attenberg provides a summary of her flaws and judgment errors, wondering if she deserves to be happy. Though she is "a better person now," she "will never be perfect." Nobody is, but readers of the author’s wonderful novels may expect more.
The virtues of Attenberg's fiction—story, characters, black humor—are largely missing in her first nonfiction book.
