A short life of the author
Jami Attenberg (b. 21 February 1971, suburban Chicago) is an American novelist whose fiction occupies a distinctive position in contemporary literature — she writes about family, food, desire, and the body with a warmth and directness that is rare in literary fiction and that has earned her a devoted readership among women who feel underrepresented by the conventional marriage-and-motherhood narratives that dominate the American novel. Her books are funny, generous, and emotionally honest, and they take seriously the lives of women who do not follow expected paths.
Life and Career
Attenberg grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and studied journalism and fiction writing. She has lived in Brooklyn and New Orleans — the latter move reflecting her restless, anti-conventional sensibility. She launched the #1000WordsOfSummer writing challenge, which has become one of the most popular writing-community events in America, encouraging writers to commit to producing a thousand words a day during the summer.
Her early novels — Instant Love (2006) and The Kept Man (2009) — established her voice but did not break through commercially. The Middlesteins (2012) was her breakthrough.
The Middlesteins (2012)
The Middlesteins is a novel about a Jewish family in suburban Chicago centred on Edie Middlestein, the family matriarch, who is eating herself to death. The novel follows Edie’s compulsive eating and its impact on her husband (who leaves), her children (who cope in radically different ways), and her grandchildren, and it treats food — Chinese takeaway, deli sandwiches, fried chicken — not as a metaphor but as a substance, a pleasure, a compulsion, and a form of self-destruction. It is one of the most honest novels about the relationship between the body, food, and family ever written.
All Grown Up (2017)
All Grown Up became a cultural touchstone — a novel about Andrea Bern, a single, childless woman in her late thirties living in New York, who drinks too much, has unsatisfying relationships, and does not apologise for any of it. The novel is structured as a series of loosely connected chapters that trace Andrea’s life over several years, and its refusal to treat singleness and childlessness as problems to be solved — rather than as legitimate life choices with their own pleasures and griefs — resonated deeply with a generation of women who felt invisible in literary fiction.
Other Works
Saint Mazie (2015) — based on the real Mazie Phillips Gordon, who ran a movie theatre on the Bowery during the Depression and was famous for her generosity to the homeless — is Attenberg’s most structurally ambitious novel, told through diary entries, oral histories, and multiple voices. All This Could Be Yours (2019) — about a family confronting the impending death of a tyrannical patriarch whose crimes are gradually revealed — is her most emotionally complex novel, exploring what families owe to truth and what they owe to self-preservation.
I Came All This Way to Meet You (2022) — a memoir — explores her life as a writer, traveler, and person who has chosen a path outside conventional expectations.
Themes and Critical Standing
Attenberg writes about women’s lives with a refusal of sentimentality that is itself a form of warmth. Her characters eat, drink, have sex, make bad decisions, and refuse to apologise for being complicated. She is particularly strong on the body — not the idealised body of literary convention but the body that gains weight, ages, hurts, and desires.
She has been compared to Nora Ephron (for the combination of wit and emotional intelligence), to Laurie Colwin (for the treatment of food and domesticity), and to Meg Wolitzer (as a fellow chronicler of educated, liberal American life). Her dedicated readership — cultivated through social media presence and the #1000WordsOfSummer community — is one of the most engaged in contemporary fiction.
Key Works
- The Middlesteins (2012)
- All Grown Up (2017)
- All This Could Be Yours (2019)
Collecting Attenberg
First editions (Grand Central Publishing, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) bring $10–$25. All Grown Up (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) is the most collected title; signed copies bring $20–$40. Attenberg signs at literary events and bookshops.