Liars and Saints

  Jami Attenberg attended Johns Hopkins, where she was sexually assaulted. She was discouraged from reporting the incident, but she made a report. Various deans came to Attenberg with an option: You can have the guy expelled, or you can allow him to attend weekly therapy sessions. At this point, vicious rumors were circulating with regard to Attenberg. She didn't want to ruin a life. She chose the weekly therapy sessions. A year later, after Attenberg had attempted suicide, she was connected with her own series of therapy sessions. The sessions didn't achieve anything, and Attenberg stopped going, and no one seemed to notice. What followed was heavy drug use and aimlessness. Attenberg wrote three novels, then her publisher dumped her. A fourth novel found its way to Jonathan Franzen; this happened by accident. Franzen offered a blurb--and his two sentences changed the course of Attenberg's career. But success wasn't simple. Attenberg describes a particular reading; at t...

 Jami Attenberg's novel "A Reason to See You Again" is just about an ordinary family; the events it describes are utterly normal.  The dad is secretly gay; he dies early. The mom spirals and becomes an alcoholic. One daughter--a high-flyer--goes to work for a version of Apple. She wants to create tiny computers that people can carry in their pockets. The other daughter becomes a negligent parent and a "consumer" of self-help books. All three of these women take care of one another in imperfect ways. Mom is emotionally abusive; later, Self-Help Daughter is an impatient nurse at Mom's bedside. High-Flyer wants to be a good aunt--but part of the job, as she sees it, is a commitment to digging for gossip. High-Flyer encourages her niece to say bad things about Self-Help Daughter--then High-Flyer pretends to be dismayed as she sifts through the scandalous stories. My particular allegiance was with High-Flyer Daughter. She is gay, but in denial, and she ends up in...

 Some writers seem to have instant success. Lorrie Moore, Amy Bloom, Alice McDermott--all seem to have flashed across the sky like lightning, blah blah blah. (I think McDermott's "origin story" is especially irritating.) By contrast, Jami Attenberg failed--again and again. At the age of twenty, she made the mistake of seeking approval from the novelist Robert Stone. Stone was a terrible teacher (I feel I know this, because I observed him in action)--and he sighed, when he saw Attenberg. "Honey," he said, "not everyone can make it as a writer. You could try a career in publishing...." Attenberg dusted herself off and continued to write. She went broke three times. She noticed that her own preferred topics ("a woman waits, for twenty pages, to get her period") didn't always line up with conventional "Pulitzer" material ("a history of the Vietnam War").....She traveled. She made friends with established writers--not for s...

If you're reading Jami Attenberg's "All This Could Be Yours," let's chat! If you haven't started yet, skip this piece (and buy the book). *This seems to be a story about living with Donald Trump. Attenberg doesn't spell that out, but she gives us a patriarch who is a bad man. A patriarch who abuses powerless people. And she asks: How do you live with such a man? *This novel is interested in gender. Sometimes, a man is neither bad nor good. In one of my favorite scenes, a woman fields a call. It's her young daughter. The daughter is complaining about Daddy. (Daddy and Mommy are divorced.) "Mommy, when Daddy took me to the mall, he ran into a lady and lied about his girlfriend. Which says that he has actually more than one girlfriend. So am I--also--meant to lie on his behalf?" Why should women and girls have to field these questions? Mommy sighs. "Your dad isn't a bad man," she says. She pauses. "But he isn't...