All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg

I was in the right place, at that moment, to go in and see what these bookstores had to say to me.

Some of those stores have been there for many, many years, and they each have their own sensibility. My events happened in the evening, so I had my days free, which was an amazing luxury, and because I was staying in the Mission-a neighborhood with some really great bookstores-I decided to take one day just to walk from one bookstore to another. Jami Attenberg: In the spring of 2018, I was in San Francisco for three days on the paperback tour for my last book. She lives in New Orleans, and spoke with me by phone. Her nonfiction appears in venues like The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Longreads, among other publications. Jami Attenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up. Besides the secret betrayals that can splinter a family, the book is also about various ways people handle everyday forms of loneliness-a condition that can be a curse, a gift, a justification, or maybe the doorway to the gods. Set over the course of a single day, the novel traces the cruel man’s impact on his surviving family members. We talked about the difference between solitude and loneliness, why long walks are central to her creative practice, and how one’s brain can be one’s best companion.Īll This Could Be Yours focuses on the death and dark legacy of a patriarch, Victor Tuchman, who suffers a sudden heart attack in the book’s first pages. In a conversation for this series, Attenberg, the author of All This Could Be Yours, explained how the poems collected in Absolute Solitude, an English translation of Loynaz’s work, helped her create her characters and understand her own relationship to isolation. For decades, Loynaz lived alone in a mansion at the center of Havana, writing enigmatic, evocative poems-many of them just one line-that could be both deeply confessional and stubbornly withholding. But few take solitude as far as the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz.

Writers, says the novelist Jami Attenberg, often like to be alone.

All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg