Jami Attenberg

I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.
Andrea Bern is a whip-smart woman in NYC “who is doing what she wants with her life, right or wrong, and not apologizing for it… at times she is a wise sage, and at other times, a selfish mess. It makes her so achingly human” (Liberty Hardy, Book Riot). Andrea’s single, she’s childfree, she’s successful and yet not entirely devoted to her career. Everyone around her seems to have an entirely different idea of what it means to be an adult: marriage, babies, ambition. But what if those things aren’t what you want? What does it actually mean to be a woman and a grown up, in this day and age?
Andrea’s brother seems unscathed by their shared tumultuous childhood, but when he and her sister-in-law have a baby born with a heartbreaking ailment, Andrea and her family have to confront everything they haven’t wanted to face, and reexamine what really matters. In a world that still expects women to gravitate toward partnership and motherhood, Jami Attenberg gives us a pithy and sharp novel of living life on your own terms, and a character who is witty, winning, sexy and complicated.

“Jami Attenberg’s sharply drawn protagonist, Andrea, has such a riveting, propulsive voice that All Grown Up is hard to put down, but I urge you to resist reading it in one sitting. Both the prose and the author’s knowing excavation of one woman’s desires, compromises, strengths, and fears deserve closer attention. Like Andrea herself, this novel is beautiful and brutal, intelligent and funny, frank and sexy.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times best-selling author of The Nest