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Jami Attenberg & Friends / All Grown Up
April 12, 2018 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+0
FreeJoin us as we celebrate the paperback launch of Jami Attenberg’sAll Grown Up, with local superheroes Charlie Jane Anders, Rachel Khong, and Esmé Weijun Wang all talking on the themes of adulthood and what it means to be a grown up.
“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.
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“I read it twice, laughing, cringing, and even tearing up.” — Judy Blume, New York Times
“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
“Hilarious, courageous, and mesmerizing from page one, All Grown Up is a little gem that packs a devastating wallop. It’s that rare book I’m dying to give all my friends so we can discuss it deep into the night. I’m in awe of Jami Attenberg.” — Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
“Jami Attenberg’s Andrea is the most addicting female protagonist voice I have read in years, with her cutting observations on human relationships. This witty journey through a mess of men, female friendships, family, and boozy urban existence positions the single girl not as object to be fixed but as contemporary sage and seer: the ultimate witness of truth in love today.” — Melissa Broder, author of So Sad Today
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Jami Attenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of five novels, including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays about sex, urban life, and food to theNew York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and Lenny Letter, among other publications.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, out now. She’s the organizer of the Writers With Drinks reading series, and she was a founding editor of io9, a website about science fiction, science and futurism. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction,The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. Her novelette Six Months, Three Days won a Hugo award.
Rachel Khong grew up in Southern California, and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Florida. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland,American Short Fiction, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and California Sunday. She lives in San Francisco. Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel.
Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.