I Came All This Way to Meet You audiobook

The essays in this book are written beautifully by a WRITER (yes, in all caps.) Attenberg is a WRITER. Stunning voice. Funny. Equally, provocative. And truthful. Attenberg’s pen is ferocious. This is a masterclass. Highly recommend getting a copy.

Attenberg can write. She is a professional writer, period. I didn’t find her life particularly of note (in a way where you could say this memoir is about xy or z) or the idea of a memoir rooted in writing to be particularly of interest to me and YET the book held my attention in a real way. That is a testament to Attenberg’s skill as a writer and sentence crafter. Ultimately the book fizzled toward the end, but mostly the book holds.

I normally do not gravitate towards reading books on the “craft” of writing which is what I assumed this book was. However, I am a fan of Jami Attenberg’s fiction so I said why not try this out? I am so glad I did. This collection of essays felt so refreshing. Learning more about what it takes for someone who devotes their life to telling stories and sharing their own in such an honest and vulnerable way - had me in tears and it also had me appreciating books even more.

I loved this. Moving, intimate, bracing, funny, generous, complicated. Like everything she writes, it strikes deep.

Thanks to Netgalley and Ecco for the ebook. The author gives you such an interesting glimpse into the life of the writer by giving you her life and anxieties about her life and not the breakdowns or eureka moments of the actual books she wrote (she refers to the third book as that, never giving you the title). But the everything else is so interesting. Coming from a modest midwestern family, the author lives on the margins of life for so many years with no safety net except for the extraordinary friends she makes along the way. She has such a need for movement. When things get secure at a job she quits. When she’s in a city too long, she moves. You get the feeling that she’s going to be one of those people who was the most talented writer in her MFA class, but then never does much after that. But then she sells a book and then another and on and on until she is a person who can actually make a living as a writer. It’s lovely, after all these struggles, to see her successful and to find a home for herself in New Orleans.

I just love the way Jami Attenberg writes! Gorgeous memoir that is laid out in different essays. The essay about her sexual assault and the Kavanaugh hearing was my favorite. Rivaled only by the essay about Amelia Earhart and her friend Kristen.

Perhaps it's not surprising that I adored this book. I have long admired Jami Attenberg's writing, but if we're being honest, I think I admired her life more. She's a single woman who has found her own way in the world, making a home in New Orleans, but also in the writing world, where she has fought to make her living from writing and built a supportive and inspiring community through her generosity on social media and #1000wordsofsummer and her craft newsletter. This memoir in essays is about the journey to do all of those things, but it's also about travel and romance and friendship and family and growing up and making mistakes and words and triumphs and failures. I underlined so many lines because they felt like they were taken straight from my brain. Lines like: "As if I could solve the mystery of myself through understanding someone else." "I knew home was in the books for me." "I have always slipped into discomfort around affluence." "I was aware I lived on another planet, but I wasn't quite sure why...I am still flattered when people want to be my friend." "Do you know this continuous tension of needing and not needing people? Knowing they're nearby, happy they're there, but wishing them away, too." "It was just so hard not to notice things. I could never shut off my general state of awareness." "I mistake control of my outward appearance as architecture for my soul." "The books we carry with us when we travel become a part of that journey." "A lifetime of the observing of others awaited me, and perhaps I already knew that, I was so comfortable with the behavior, even if part of me knew it would be nice to have that kind of fun, too." "Who knows what my life would have been like if I'd had any confidence in my appearance as a youth." "I did not want to change anything about my life--I had worked so hard for it--but also at that moment, I did not want to be alone. I was exhausted with doing all the work of being on my own. I wanted someone to dine with at the nicest restaurant in town." "I knew that I would live with a certain kind of heartache forever, that it had been ingrained in me since birth somehow. But maybe there could be moments where I soothed it."Anyway, I loved it. My only criticism? I wanted to read more about her dog!

This book is a collection of essays containing several stories about how the author developed her creative identity through her travels and jobs. During these adventures, she begins to reflect on their experiences - the trauma, the challenges, and the risks she has taken over the years. It's about how she kept writing through it all, which helps her define herself as a true artist.There's so much in this book to unpack. I can't believe how many jobs the author had and how much time she's spent traveling across the United States. The way she described her journeys from the lens of beds to trips was amazing. Here's one paragraph I loved. The author wrote, "The only kind of makeup I have ever really loved is lipstick. I love all the bright colors, wild, hysterical pinks that turn a dull outfit up, poke a hole in a grey day, or bright, sexy, sultry reds that stain my lips for hours marked in some way. I like the way lipstick can interact with my eyes, which I feel like most of the time are happier on their own undressed. I like thinking about my mouth after many years of not thinking about it at all. A thing I like on my face, I can confirm it, my mouth. I will decorate that. It took me many years to arrive at that place, to find a thing I wanted to paint."To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:https://zibbyowens.com/transcript/jam...

I'd surprisingly never read anything by Jami Attenberg previously. Reading her memoir sent me off in search of her fiction books. This book reads like I think: In disjointed streams of consciousness. I felt this was an open, honest, and heartfelt book of essays. I believe if you were already a fan, this will give you insight to the author, and if you have just learned of Ms. Attenberg, you will enjoy her fiction writing even more. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC!

This book is thoughtful and honest. I like how it wandered between time and place.

I've only read one of Attenberg's novels, which I liked fine, although I can remember anything about it now and have never been inspired to pick up another one. I'm honestly not especially inspired to pick one up now. But I absolutely loved this memoir. There's a lot in here about writing, but mostly it's about the grind, the long, winding, confusing work of growing into yourself. Even the writing itself feels winding, full of long sentences that seem to go on and on, that give the book this relentless momentum. Attenberg writes about being a young writer, about working hard, year after year after year, about moving from place to place, job to job, person to person, a kind of floating, untethered existence. There is so much honesty in it. I so appreciate her realness, not just about the writing life but about the ordinary work of living.One thing I especially appreciated was her writing about her life in her thirties and forties, and how messy a lot of it was. We expect people to be messy in their twenties. There's this idea that that's what your twenties are for—for exploring, figuring things out, trying things out, messing up. The whole idea of "finding yourself" in your twenties sets up this weird expectation that you'll get older and have it all figured. And while I certainly wouldn't go back to my twenties for anything, and certainly feel a bit more grounded than I did then, it's not as if I have arrived somewhere final. So much of this book is about that—Attenberg writes about calming down, for sure, but it's not like she suddenly gets wise and arrives in the life she'd always dreamed of. She gets wiser bit by bit, slowly, over decades, but she keeps struggling and learning and recalibrating and discovering new truths about herself and the world.This book made me think so much about what writers can offer the world. It doesn't really matter whether I like Attenberg's fiction or not. I don't need to appreciate her fiction to appreciate her experience as a writer, and especially as a woman writer, in the world. There's a warmth to this book, as well as an unrelenting hardness. I found myself nodding along. I sometimes caught my breath. I loved what she has to say about friendship, about being a single woman, about the differences between loneliness and being along, the places they blur and they places they separate. I love what she has to say about making art, which sometimes reflects my own experience of writing and sometimes does not. That is all to say, this book felt like the way I was meant to access Attenberg's work, and I appreciate the gift of it immensely.

In I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home, Jami Attenberg's frankness and transparency grip readers, as they watch her struggle and succeed, inching closer towards her goal of writing. Her first essay focuses on her relationship with her mother, and I was touched by the way she honestly and gently shares. Attenberg's skill is apparent, and I was utterly delighted by what I view to be a perfectly formed sentence in chapter two, one that goes on and on with the sparsest of punctuation but heaps of interest when describing her hometown.This is a love story about writing, with affirmations and encouragement for others, told through her travels and relationships.(I received a digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.)