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    All Grown Up
    All Grown Up
    All Grown Up
    Audiobook5 hours

    All Grown Up

    Written by Jami Attenberg

    Narrated by Mia Barron

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the New York Times best-selling author of The Middlesteins comes a wickedly funny novel about a thirty-nine-year-old single, childfree woman who defies convention as she seeks connection. Who is Andrea Bern? When her therapist asks the question, Andrea knows the right things to say: she's a designer, a friend, a daughter, a sister. But it's what she leaves unsaid-she's alone, a drinker, a former artist, a shrieker in bed, captain of the sinking ship that is her flesh-that feels the most true. Everyone around her seems to have an entirely different idea of what it means to be an adult: her best friend, Indigo, is getting married; her brother-who miraculously seems unscathed by their shared tumultuous childhood-and sister-in-law are having a hoped-for baby; and her friend Matthew continues to wholly devote himself to making dark paintings at the cost of being flat broke. But when Andrea's niece finally arrives, born with a heartbreaking ailment, the Bern family is forced to reexamine what really matters. Will this drive them together or tear them apart? Told in gut-wrenchingly honest, mordantly comic vignettes, All Grown Up is a breathtaking display of Jami Attenberg's power as a storyteller, a whip-smart examination of one woman's life, lived entirely on her own terms.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 7, 2017
    ISBN9781501946547
    Author

    Jami Attenberg

    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.

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    Reviews for All Grown Up

    3.5/5

    164 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book was very tough to get through as the emotions are hard.
    • 4/5
      Living the Imperfect Life

      If you are an artist, but you can’t create art. If you have sex but can’t get into love and commitment. If you have a family but you can’t acknowledge you love them and wish to be part of their lives. If you know from experience and from your childhood that alcohol and drugs will hurt you but you use them anyway. If you get a good paying job as a designer in advertising and you hate but keep it just because it pays. If you do all these things (and, really, who doesn’t do a few of them?), aren’t you just passing through life? And, if you are anything like Andrea Bern, Jami Attenberg’s sharp witted protagonist, you obsess on these things, on your meandering and stumbling journey to age forty.

      It will probably come as no surprise to anybody that the vast majority of reviewers, professional and avid reader types, are women. But this doesn’t mean that All Grown Up is what the trade calls Chic Lit. Readers will not find the typical wacky, iconoclastic woman here (though Andrea certainly seems that way, at first), but rather, someone trying to sort out her life, without much success. She claims to know what’s wrong, but does she? If she does, why doesn’t she fix the wrongs? There is no neat, tied-with-a-bow ending here.

      Nor does it mean that it’s a novel men won’t enjoy and maybe learn from. Men, generally, even male novelists, don’t do a lot of baring of the soul of the type you’ll find in this novel (though sometimes they do, as in Chris Bachelder’s very good The Throwback Special), and usually aren’t comfortable with the level of introspection and self-knowledge on exhibition in Andrea. You know, maybe they should be. Maybe reading Attenberg’s novel would be a good experience a type of emotional liberation. And it helps that Attenberg is a terrific writer, terrific with The Middlesteins, and as terrific here with a novel about a woman who knows and doesn’t know herself.
    • 2/5
      Enjoyed Saint Mazie much more. But this is innovative and edgy. The first chapter is in 2nd person which sort of creates the formula for how to be supremely unhappy in your life. Andrea, the narrator beginning in Chapter 2, is living it. This chronicles her life in NYC -- from childhood to her present adulthood (which still resembles a childhood even though she has turned 40). She has some baggage from her past -- activist mother; musician, drug-overdosed father; rock star brother. She herself is a failed artist --at least that is what she allows to define her. She has some baggage in her present: conflicted relationship with her mother, drug & alcohol addictions, dismal dating choices, a terminally ill niece, and an inability to sustain relationships of any kind. Watching her work through some of this is gratifying, but hard to tell if it sticks or if there is really resolution at the end, but the one good thing is that she doesn't try to paint herself a victim. Just not my world-view/experience, but would make a good indie film that I might watch on a long flight.
    • 4/5
      Not your typical story about a 39/40 year old woman. I love how it’s short stories and not particularly in chronological order. Just maaahvelous, dahling.
    • 3/5
      What does it mean to be a grown up? Is it having a job and your own apartment? Is it being in a stable relationship? Is it getting married and having kids? Or is is something less tangible like having a plan, liking yourself, being emotionally content? Do you get to measure it yourself or must you rely on others' judgment that you are, in fact, all grown up? As my children reach legal adulthood and venture out in the world, these are questions I ask more and more. Jami Attenberg's short novel, All Grown Up, also asks and attempts to answer just these questions.Andrea is turning 40. That's certainly old enough to be considered "all grown up," but is she? She has a decent job that she hates, still mourning the loss of her dream of an art career. Her romantic relationships are awful, often one-offs, casual, and disengaged. She's emotionally unavailable to friends and family. She drinks too much, dabbles with drugs, is pretty insufferable and self-centered, and is definitely still trying to figure out who she is and what she wants from life. All she knows is that she doesn't want the life others have settled into and so she can be dismissive of other's choices and their definitions of being an adult. Andrea lives in an apartment with a good view, at least until another building goes up and blocks the view entirely, leaving her trapped in a formerly good apartment, much as she's trapped in a disappointing life.This is a novel in vignettes, a character study of Andrea. It is non-chronological, jumping around from her teen years to the present to build a picture of why Andrea is the way that she is. What she is is deeply dysfunctional and only starting to figure things out at the end of the novel as she holds the tiny, cold hand of her terminally ill niece. There isn't much of a plot and the story is tenuously held together, perhaps because of the narrative structure. And while this is billed as a book about a woman who is single and childless by choice, it comes off rather as if these things happened to her out of apathy rather than active decision making on her part. In the end, maybe being a grown up is changing the things about life that make you unhappy, making choices that will lead you toward the existence you've been moaning about not having, and being emotionally forgiving and available to your loved one, friends, and family. Has Andrea learned this? Hard to say. Long before the end of the novel and any potential, hinted at change, I was tired of Andrea and her one note life. It would have been better if I had been able to feel sorry for her. Instead, I just didn't care about her at all. This book seems to be pretty polarizing though so perhaps you'll be one of the people who loves it.
    • 5/5
      Jami Attenberg is a new author for me. She has a new novel out that got good reviews and this book was at the library so I thought I would read it. It was an excellent book. The main character, Andrea Bern is a 40 year old New Yorker who is single, in a well paying job she hates, a would be artist, sister and daughter, and getting in out of drugs, alcohol and bad relationship choices. Told in individual chapters that bounce around her life it allows us to see her at different times with knowledge about what went before and what will come. It is an interesting technique that many modern writers use and it works with this book. The character is not likable but Attenberg skillfully is able to keep our interest because we know enough about Andrea's inner life to understand her problems. I found myself rooting for her. The book touched on many life issues but did it in a good concise way(200 pages). There was no excess in this book. A strong recommendation. I immediately got another or her books that I am now reading which is entirely different. A sign of a good author.
    • 2/5
      2.0

      The characters and writing just did not have enough substance to make this shallow material float. It read like a collection of vignettes from a very boring diary.
    • 5/5
      Lovely read
    • 4/5
      Told in a series of short stories/vignettes, All Grown Up gives us a portrait of disaffected, self-absorbed New Yorker Andrea who is a failed-but-never-really-tried artist, hates her job, fires her therapist, fights with her mother, sleeps around, drinks too much, and thinks too much. Andrea is annoying and self-centered, afraid to make real connections with people, but so adrift in her own life, she can't see the source of her own unhappiness. It would be easy to hate Andrea, and I kind of did - but I also liked her and felt for her, and I think it's a credit to Attenberg's skill that she could successfully draw such a character.
    • 3/5
      Andrea Bern is a 40-something, never married, Jewish woman living in New York. Her story is told through a series of vignettes...not chronologically. Through these vignettes, we see Andrea's relationship with her mother, her brother and his wife and their dying child, and with various men she dates and/or sleeps with. The way the book is written works well...like peeling away superficial layers, we discover the real Andrea and her quest to feel like a grown-up on her own terms. A quick read, but Andrea is an interesting character.
    • 4/5
      A slightly amusing and somewhat sad story of being a young-ish single Jewish woman in New York city in the 21st century. Lots of sex, drugs and family complexity, with a certain amount of tragedy. Quite easy and enjoyable reading, for sure, but Ms Attenberg's perspective doesn't capture me strongly enough for her to make it on to my Favourite Authors list.
    • 4/5
      So smart, so fun, so hipster. 4.5 stars.
    • 5/5
      I almost feel like I shouldn't have liked this book. It focuses on the life of an art school dropout who works for an advertising firm in New York City, drinks too much, navel-gazes a lot, sleep a with a lot of completely unsuitable men, and feels generally unfulfilled with her life and her single status. Not the sort of person I generally find interesting or easy to empathize with in a novel. But, damn it, Jami Attenberg makes me care about her, and relate to her, and feel for her. It's something in the writing, I think. The writing is terrific. It's a very clean style, nothing that feels fancy, but the words are all perfectly chosen and it's a delight to read. Which seems a bit odd to say, because the protagonist's life, in general, is not a happy one. But it is, anyway. And, in the end, it left me with a beautiful, painful knot of emotion in my stomach, which was unexpected and impressive.The structure is odd, because each chapter reads like its own tiny short story, with facts we already knew about from past chapters re-explained or characters re-introduced as if we might never have seen them before. It sounds as if it should be annoying, but it works. It doesn't feel repetitive, but rather as if we're seeing aspects of the main character's life in a relevant new context each time. And the end result very much does feel like it adds up to a novel.I doubt I would ever have picked this one up on my own initiative -- I got it from a book subscription service -- but I'm really, really glad I read it.
    • 5/5
      In these clever, savvy linked stories within the shroud of family illness, Jami Attenberg does a fine job of inserting us into the life of Andrea Bern. Frustrated painter, advertising whiz, conflicted daughter, Andrea never quite recovers from the overdose death of her father. A day spent with him playing hooky from school solidifies his charismatic hold on her. Her always tenuous relationship with her mother, who had to take drastic measures to support the family, is also a constant, amusing challenge. And, as will all young people in the throes of a NY/Brooklyn life, Andrea takes and discards lovers and friends, and is taken and discarded herself. So well told, and so rewarding when the disparate threads weave towards the end of a life and of the stories. Highly recommended.