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All Grown Up
When judge Laia Garcia picked this title for March's BOTM, she said, "I’m only on page eleven of All Grown Up, but I can already tell that this is the perfect book to read on the first day of my 'grown-woman takes first-ever alone vacation to an exotic location in order to shed past and re-emerge more powerful than ever.' I will sit in a banquet in the hotel restaurant and will read the book in one sitting, while drinking lots of coffee and eating Spanish pastries. Like me and my friends. Andrea is a woman unlike many others I've come across in my readings. She's not perfect, but her imperfections are not steeped in the tragic. We meet all her friends and romantic conquests, and learn how they came into Andrea's life in short chapters that could stand alone as short stories. So you can read the book slowly, like for a month, on your commute, or sit with it and devour it because what’s the point of saving it for later? A book for the women who are warned, but persist." Add Audible narration for $4.49.
About the Book
Publisher’s description:
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.
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