| HMH Books 👋 Hello readers!👋 Arianna here! It's been a while (ICYMI: I was on maternity leave) but I'm so excited to be back — especially in time to chat about Jami Attenberg's latest poignant and hilarious family drama, All This Could Be Yours. In their review, Kirkus described Attenberg as "the poet laureate of difficult families." Let's see if you agree. And if you haven't already, check out an excerpt here. Want to share your first impressions? Join the conversation here. Happy reading, Arianna 📚 Behind the Book 📚 We asked Jami Attenberg to tell us a bit about how All This Could Be Yours came to be. Here's what she had to say. All my books start with a voice in my head, a character who shows up and has something urgent to say and absolutely refuses to leave. Sometimes I try to shake them – maybe they feel a little too complicated to write – but the trickiest ones are always worth your time.
I heard the first voice of All This Could Be Yours right after I had dropped off some family members at the airport. It had been an extremely pleasant visit, but a drive home from the airport can give you the time to get pretty real with yourself. I had played tourist with them all weekend – New Orleans is the number one tourist destination in the world – and now I was sort of reflecting on family and life, but also this city I had moved to only a few years before, and everything that goes into making it work as a place to visit and drink and eat and be decadent. All of it sort of mish-mashed inside me.
And then this character showed up: She was the daughter of a man who was on his deathbed, and she was sitting on the roof of a hotel getting drunk with her sister-in-law, bitching about her dying father, being kind of hilarious and emotional and brutal all at the same time. I thought, “Oh boy, she’s kind of a tough one. Wonder what it would be like to set her out on the streets of New Orleans.”
She kept talking. By the time I got home I had already written the first scene. I knew she was newly divorced and smart and a little lonely, and that her father was a bad man and her mother was an enabler and her brother was in denial and all of them were a mess. I also knew she loved her parents, and that she was funny and alive. I couldn’t have shut her up if I tried. So I started from there and did not stop until I reached the end, until she and everyone in her family had said all they had come to say.
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