Jami Attenberg. (2022). I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. HarperCollins.

Jami Attenberg. 2022. I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. HarperCollins.

Jami Attenberg, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. HarperCollins, 2022.

Jami Attenberg. I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. HarperCollins, 2022.

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     Jami Attenberg is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up, a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You, and, most recently, 1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. She is the founder of the annual #1000WordsofSummer project, and maintains the popular Craft Talk newsletter year-round. Her work has been published in sixteen languages. She lives in New Orleans.

   • name: Jami Attenberg

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I Came All This Way to Meet You

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Named a Best Book of the Year by: Time * New Yorker * Sunday Times (UK)

From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling memoir about unlocking and embracing her creativity—and how it saved her life.

In this brilliant, fierce, and funny memoir of transformation, Jami Attenberg—described as a "master of modern fiction" (Entertainment Weekly) and the "poet laureate of difficult families" (Kirkus Reviews)—reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life, and voice, she could claim for herself. What does it take to devote oneself to art? What does it mean to own one's ideas? What does the world look like for a woman moving solo through it?

As the daughter of a traveling salesman in the Midwest, Attenberg was drawn to a life on the road. Frustrated by quotidian jobs and hungry for inspiration and fresh experiences, her wanderlust led her across the country and eventually on travels around the globe. Through it all she grapples with questions of mortality, otherworldliness, and what we leave behind.

It is during these adventures that she begins to reflect on the experiences of her youth—the trauma, the challenges, the risks she has taken. Driving across America on self-funded book tours, sometimes crashing on couches when she was broke, she keeps writing: in researching articles for magazines, jotting down ideas for novels, and refining her craft, she grows as an artist and increasingly learns to trust her gut and, ultimately, herself.

Exploring themes of friendship, independence, class, and drive, I Came All This Way to Meet You is an inspiring story of finding one's way home—emotionally, artistically, and physically—and an examination of art and individuality that will resonate with anyone determined to listen to their own creative calling.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Chicago Tribune
   • content: "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."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Boston Globe
   • content: "[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."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Claire Dederer,  New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
   • content: "[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."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Guardian
   • content: "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."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal (starred review)
   • content: "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. . . . 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."
6. • premium: False
   • source: The Brooklyn Rail
   • content: "To say this book was a delight to read is putting it lightly."
7. • premium: False
   • source: BookPage (Starred)
   • content: "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."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Liz Moore, author of Long Bright River
   • content: "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."
9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 1, 2021
     

     In I Came All This Way To Meet You, New York Times best-selling author Attenberg explains that as the daughter of a traveling salesman she came by her wanderlust naturally and shows how reflecting on her early years during her travels led her to writing--and particularly her theme of troubled families (75,000-copy first printing). Award-winning actress and Food Network star Bertinelli follows up her No. 1 New York Times best-selling memoir Losing It with inspiration as she turns 60 in Enough Already (100,000-copy first printing). In High-Risk Homosexual, a memoir ranging from funny (a baby speaking an ancient Jesuit language) to heartbreaking (the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando), Gomez explains how he came to embrace his gay, Latinx identity within a culture of machismo. In This Boy We Made, Harris relates her efforts to determine what is suddenly wrong with her bouncy 22-month-old boy in a system frequently inhospitable to Black mothers and her discovery when meeting with a geneticist that she has medical issues of her own. In Admissions, James relates the complications of being a diversity recruiter for select, largely white prep schools after attending The Taft School as its first Black legacy student. Attorney, podcaster, and Extra correspondent Lindsay discusses growing up in Dallas, TX; her career in law; and why she chose to be the first Black Bachelorette on The Bachelor in Miss Me with That. Miller reveals how he made the Jump, taking Nike's Jordan Brand from a relatively modest $150 million sneaker producer to a $4.5 billion worldwide footwear and apparel phenomenon while also recalling his teenage jailtime and the nightmares from which he still suffers and arguing for criminal justice reform and greater educational opportunities for the currently or formerly imprisoned. After her mother, actress Roseanne Barr, moved the family to celebrity-soaked Hollywood from working-class Denver, using personal details from their lives there for her sitcom's storylines, the teenaged Pentland endured anxiety and eating issues and various 1980s-sanctioned self-help interventions while muttering to herself This Will Be Funny Later (evidently proved here). In Lost & Found, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker staffer Schulz explores the bittersweet reality of meeting the woman she would marry just 18 months before losing her father. Readers Rise with Vonn as she earns 82 World Cup wins, 20 World Cup titles, seven World Championship medals, and three Olympic medals to become one of the top women ski racers of all time. Raised in Albania, the last Communist country in Europe, where the final tumble of Stalin's and Hoxha's statues soon led to economic chaos, political violence, and the flight of the disillusioned, Ypi has earned the right more than most to ponder what it means to be Free.

     Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 15, 2021
      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      October 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.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 1, 2021
      Novelist Attenberg (All This Could Be Yours, 2019) offers up a memoir-in-essays reflecting, at midlife, on writing, creativity, travel, and singledom. Characters in her fiction tend to be flawed and sprung from difficult families, and while Attenberg's family is surprisingly lovely, she presents herself as she would a character, warts and all. Seeming to be looking for something but not sure what, she uproots herself, with a stint couch-surfing at an age that many would consider too old, travels extensively (often on a book tour) in search of new experiences, and contemplates her lifelong craft. While she does have relationships, she mostly lives and travels alone, finding solitude but also confronting a society that questions the standing of a single woman. Attenberg tends to make friends wherever she goes, which is no surprise given that her 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 (2018), or an autobiographical ode to single ladies like Glynnis MacNicol's No One Tells You This (2018).

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Named a Best Book of the Year by: Time * New Yorker * Sunday Times (UK)

From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling memoir about unlocking and embracing her creativity—and how it saved her life.

In this brilliant, fierce, and funny memoir of transformation, Jami Attenberg—described as a "master of modern fiction" (Entertainment Weekly) and the "poet laureate of difficult families" (Kirkus Reviews)—reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life, and voice, she could claim for herself. What does it take to devote oneself to art? What does it mean to own one's ideas? What does the world look like for a woman moving solo through it?

As the daughter of a traveling salesman in the Midwest, Attenberg was drawn to a life on the road. Frustrated by quotidian jobs and hungry for inspiration and fresh experiences, her wanderlust led her across the country and eventually on...

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