All Grown Up - Hardcover

An Amazon Best Book of March 2017: A friend came to my apartment for the first time recently, frowning at the futon in the living room. “A futon?! You’re not in your 20s anymore!” Evidently a couch, an actual couch, is an indicator of adulthood—as is marriage, and the requisite 2.5 kids. By those standards, thirty-nine-year-old Andrea Bern, the unapologetically single and childless protagonist of Jami Attenberg’s bitingly funny and heartrending All Grown Up doesn’t fit the bill, and she’s fine with that (if her mother and much of society is not). But while living a life according to one’s own playbook has its perks, it also has pitfalls, and Andrea isn’t immune to a little existential crisis. Cue the passive aggressive trips to her therapist, a revolving door of unsuitable suitors, and the near-abandonment of one of the true loves of her life: her art. So steeped in ennui is she that Andrea (almost) fails to register when life tries to yank her from it; Her best friend’s seemingly perfect marriage is imploding, as well as her brother and sister-in-law’s—the result of trying to cope with their child’s precarious, and incurable illness. And they need Andrea, something that takes a little while to sink in, but once it does, she realizes that the road to adulthood is not paved with “real” furniture. It’s an epiphany that will punch you in the heart, and Attenberg has perfect aim. --Erin Kodicek, The Amazon Book Review

JAMI ATTENBERG is the New York Times best-selling author of six novels, including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays about sex, urban life, and food to the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and Lenny Letter, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans, LA.