Attenberg gets so deep into the psyches of her characters that the story ends up seeming electric with ruin, and with possible resurrection…This is how you write a very good novel about a very bad man…All This Could Be Yours is full of hope—but it is to say that the novel is most powerful when it’s in honest open battle with that which makes hope so difficult in the first place.” — New York Times
“With her sixth novel, Jami Attenberg…secures her place as an oddly sparkling master of warped family sagas…All This Could Be Yours is orchestrated with the precision of an opera on a revolving stage…Full of brio.” — NPR
“All This Could Be Yours is an engaging portrait of the unshakable connection of family.” — Vogue
“Arguably Attenberg’s best novel to date…Attenberg’s characters compellingly offer a frank glimpse into the scourge of late capitalism and toxic masculinity in the United States…As family secrets unspool, the years of resentment and anger burn off in this tightly drawn novel.” — The Observer
"Attenberg is a master at excavating the good, the bad and the ugly truths about families, and in this short but potent novel, her richly human characters populate a witty narrative studded with surprises." — People, Book of the Week
“Complicated families are Attenberg’s speciality, and she more than delivers on that premise here.” — Buzzfeed
“Told from multiple perspectives, All This Could Be Yours illustrates the heartbreak, isolation and chaos that comes from really getting to know your family.” — Time
"Attenberg is never less than wise, hilarious, and deeply real about all the fundamental topics: families, love, death, money, and knowing when you can fix something versus when you maybe can't." — Isaac Fitzgerald
“Attenberg is...a masterful psychoanalyst...she doesn’t flinch from digging into life’s messiness, pressing gently but resolutely into wounds to see what oozes out. Attenberg’s medium, as much as the written word, is familial dysfunction. And the Tuchman family is a matryoshka stacking doll of dysfunction....The narrative voice is complex and profound...Attenberg writes with care about even the most glancing characters – a random streetcar driver, a Pilates instructor on a hike, a stroke victim sharing Victor’s hospital ward – her narrative touching so many souls, it’s like a spirit passing through.” — USA Today
“Attenberg explores violence, corruption, infidelity and betrayal – with a satisfying set of consequences.” — BBC
“Versatile, earthbound, and unforgiving, the novelist returns to the comic blend of messy family drama that made The Middlesteins such a smart best seller. This time, the madness swirls around the (sort of) grown children of the dying Victor, a tyrannical and very shady real-estate developer.” — Boris Kachka, Vulture
“While the plot of All This Could Be Yours only takes place over a single day — albeit a very, very long day — the stories told in the novel encapsulate lifetimes.” — Salon
“Attenberg is on a roll…[the] combination of ambitious scope and economical treatment [and the] spirit of unsentimental generosity, recall the divine Grace Paley, a comparison Attenberg has inspired more than once…Like a little chili pepper in the chocolate, that particular kind of dark laughter is Attenberg’s secret ingredient.” — Newsday
“If you feed off of dysfunctional family drama that’s not your own, you’ll eat this up.” — Cosmopolitan
“All hail Jami Attenberg, the queen of dysfunctional families.” — Refinery 29
“Big Little Lies meets Succession in the scorching heat of the Big Easy—that’s All This Could Be Yours, the story of a power-hungry patriarch on his deathbed and a family reckoning with a secret past. Money, power and family are touched upon through Attenberg’s emotional, humorous and sharply written accounts." — Parade
“A richly drawn pleasure.” — People
“All This Could Be Yours complicates the narrative of shitty men and forgiveness…By focusing on the women who Victor has harmed, Attenberg offers a fleeting world where even messy, sometimes-bad women deserve justice on their own terms…With at times painfully sharp precision and beautiful language, Attenberg complicates our understanding of and expectation of forgiveness and healing. For some, forgiveness looks like prayer and apologies; for others, it looks like never really forgiving at all; and, for others still, it looks like forgiving the self.” — Bitch Magazine
“[A] master of modern fiction…toggling back and forth through perspectives and time, Attenberg gives each character their own rich history making even tertiary ones—a Pilates instructor, a CVS clerk, a world-weary coroner—come fantastically alive, sometimes in just a single line. New Orleans, too, is its own protagonist: a place of sticky booze and Spanish moss and endless, swampy heat that also knows its own clichés, inside and out.” — Entertainment Weekly
“Nobody writes family drama quite like Jami Attenberg, and her latest novel is a dark, deliciously captivating look into the way a toxic patriarch can poison everyone around him. There are no easy resolutions offered here, but that's as it should be.” — Nylon Magazine
“A smart, funny, beautifully observed family saga.” — Southern Living
★ 07/22/2019
A patriarch’s death strains a family’s already fraught relationships in this dazzling novel from Attenberg (All Grown Up). Shady real estate developer Victor Tuchman suffers a heart attack in New Orleans and is rushed to the hospital. During his final, lingering day, his family mentally rehashes key moments of his life in hopes of understanding the man they are losing. His wife, Barbra, still annoyed about leaving their Connecticut mansion, occupies herself with obsessive walking while remembering Victor’s quick transition from shy suitor to abusive tyrant. His daughter, Alex, flies in from Chicago, desperate to know the truth about Victor’s criminal past, and begrudges her mother’s insistence she let it go and make peace. Victor’s son Gary, who is in Los Angeles to jump-start his career in the movies, avoids answering calls from the family and intentionally misses his flight. Gary’s wife, Twyla, slips into a nervous breakdown during a cosmetic shopping spree, slowly revealing the true root of her distress. As Victor fades, the family’s dysfunction comes to light and they make drastic choices about their future. Attenberg excels at revealing rich interior lives—not only for her main cast, but also for cameo characters—in direct, lucid prose. This is a delectable family saga. (Sept.)
Narrator Thérèse Plummer depicts every degree of anger, confusion, sorrow, and regret in this dramatic story of a dysfunctional family on the day of the death of the family patriarch. Listeners will be spellbound by Plummer’s impressive skill in evoking the unrelenting outpouring of emotion throughout this highly charged and fast-paced audiobook. She creates penetrating portrayals of each character— from the abusive father, Victor, and submissive mother, Barbra, to the snide, strong-willed daughter, Alex; the critical but absent son, Gary; and his nervous wife, Twyla. Frequent shifts in point of view, as well as illuminating flashbacks to earlier days, are masterfully conveyed by Plummer and help listeners piece together and appreciate this complex and absorbing narrative. M.J. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Narrator Thérèse Plummer depicts every degree of anger, confusion, sorrow, and regret in this dramatic story of a dysfunctional family on the day of the death of the family patriarch. Listeners will be spellbound by Plummer’s impressive skill in evoking the unrelenting outpouring of emotion throughout this highly charged and fast-paced audiobook. She creates penetrating portrayals of each character— from the abusive father, Victor, and submissive mother, Barbra, to the snide, strong-willed daughter, Alex; the critical but absent son, Gary; and his nervous wife, Twyla. Frequent shifts in point of view, as well as illuminating flashbacks to earlier days, are masterfully conveyed by Plummer and help listeners piece together and appreciate this complex and absorbing narrative. M.J. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
★ 2019-07-28
After the brutish family patriarch has a heart attack, the surviving Tuchmans (mostly) gather at his deathbed, each of them struggling to make sense of their past—and come to terms with their present.
"He was an angry man, and he was an ugly man," the novel begins, "and he was tall, and he was pacing," and this is how we meet Victor Tuchman in the moments before he collapses. And so the family begins to assemble: Alex, his daughter, a newly divorced lawyer, arrives in New Orleans from the Chicago suburbs; his long-suffering wife, Barbra, tiny and stoic, is already there. His son, Gary, is very notably absent, but Gary's wife, Twyla—a family outlier, Southern and blonde—is in attendance, with her own family secrets. The novel takes place in one very long day but encompasses the entirety of lifetimes: Barbra's life before marrying Victor and the life they led after; Alex's unhappy Connecticut childhood and the growing gulf between her and her criminal father—irreconcilable, even in death. It encompasses Gary's earnest attempt to build a stable family life, to escape his family through Twyla, and Twyla's own search for meaning. Even the background characters have stories: the EMS worker who wants to move in with his girlfriend who doesn't love him; the CVS cashier leaving for school in Atlanta next year. The Tuchmans won't learn those stories, though, just as they won't learn each other's, even the shared ones. Victor is the force that brings them together but also the rift that divides them. Alex wants the truth about her father, and Barbra won't tell her; Gary wants the truth about his disintegrating marriage, and Twyla can't explain. Prickly and unsentimental, but never quite hopeless, Attenberg (All Grown Up, 2017, etc.), poet laureate of difficult families, captures the relentlessly lonely beauty of being alive.
Not a gentle novel but a deeply tender one.