I CAME ALL THIS WAY TO MEET YOU

A novelist at midlife takes stock of her personal history and accomplishments.

In this extended reflection, Attenberg offers fans of her fiction the opportunity to get to know her more intimately. "I own these words. I own these ideas. Here is my book." With these sentences, the prologue to the author’s debut memoir closes on a note of anxious self-assertion that becomes more pronounced as the narrative progresses. A loose chronicle of her jobs, homes, and travels, the book is divided into three parts that cover similar ground chronologically. Attenberg mentions several friendships with other writers—some warmly, other less so. "Writers meet for drinks for different reasons," she explains, recalling an essayist who arranged a meeting to ferret out the secret of her success with a book that appears to be The Middlesteins (2012)—though her novels are not named in this book. Attenberg criticizes the other writer for wanting to pick her brain “as if [it] were a carryout salad.” Later, after receiving a copy of Olive Kitteridge, she writes, “we receive so much from other writers when they show us how it's done….We must chew on the words of others.” In another passage, Attenberg remembers a college classmate who was at first a friend but then assaulted her; the man had recently committed suicide. "Then I read a status update on Facebook by someone who had been in our writing program,” she writes, “and he mourned him and said, ‘He was the best writer in our class,’ and I wanted to fucking scream, because I was the best writer in our class.” At the end, Attenberg provides a summary of her flaws and judgment errors, wondering if she deserves to be happy. Though she is "a better person now," she "will never be perfect." Nobody is, but readers of the author’s wonderful novels may expect more.

The virtues of Attenberg's fiction—story, characters, black humor—are largely missing in her first nonfiction book.