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Wednesday, November 20, 2024
A Reason To See You Again
I'm writing about this book because it's so readable.
No, that's not the only reason. Also because everybody involved is not a winner. Most books written about Jewish families... Everybody's solidly middle class, or upper middle class, it's a land of opportunities, despite the tsuris. But the Cohens?
The father is a Holocaust survivor. A soft man who is happy he's alive but is not setting the world on fire.
So his wife, who put aside her education to marry him, does low level jobs to pay the bills... She's just paying the bills, working to stay alive. I've had jobs like these, thank god I do not work them anymore. Where all you can do is stare at the clock. You count how much money you're going to make, how you're going to spend it. To think so many live this way.
And there are two daughters. One pretty and one smart.
And the mother is a shrew and they want to get away from her and...
It's kinda like regular life. In that everybody has big dreams and somewhere along the line you find out you are where you are, which is not where you wanted to be, are you happy, can you reinvent yourself?
That's the amazing thing about life, you can reinvent yourself. It's really hard, but you can do it. You have to shake off the past, oftentimes you have to put yourself in new situations, make a whole new group of friends... Who are trustworthy, who spur you on, but just when you think you're on the same page, bonded together...
But the heart of the story is the husband of the older daughter. A non-Jew, a traveling salesman...
I guess we live in a world where everybody can be a star. Literally, you can do this today, anybody can build a presence online. But there are a lot of people just living their lives. Doing amazing things, both good and bad.
So I'm reading this book and...
I can't put it down. I didn't love Jami Attenberg's hit book, "The Middlesteins," and this book is somewhat slight, but it's dark and average in a way most books are not. Most are fantastical. Or written in miniature, small lives in small places in detail.
And "A Reason to See You Again" is not about losers. Then again, who are the winners and the losers?
Once again, this book is very very readable. Unlike "The Emerald Mile." "The Emerald Mile" is an achievement, a great book, but there are big words and you have to commit. "A Reason to See You Again" cuts like butter. That's what people don't realize about writing, the first criterion is it must be readable.
Now finishing "A Reason to See You Again" and wanting more I researched Attenberg's other books and I found out she had a memoir with stellar reviews entitled "I Came All This Way to Meet You" and...
It too cuts like butter.
But it's not the typical story.
Attenberg went to Johns Hopkins. But then she had an endless series of low level jobs on her way to becoming an author. And a ton of experiences. She was one of the first to move to Williamsburg. She talks about drugging and drinking and screwing but... You don't get the impression she's one of the cool girls, someone you could never know or meet. Rather she seems just like you, but with different choices.
Especially in today's era, where everybody's on a career track.
And there are certain incidents in the book... Deep into it there's the story of a physical assault and the fallout and....
Attenberg is living in the real world, when so many writers put forth the image that they are not. They're members of a club, separate from the rest of us, writing for each other.
The fascinating thing is you read these novels and you wonder about the authors, who they are exactly. And now there's this memoir and you get so much information but what is Jami Attenberg like in real life and...is she really just like you and me but she just wrote it all down?
So if you're a reader, I recommend "A Reason to See You Again," because it's so damn readable. If you only read one book a year, no. If you're a guy, who doesn't like to look inside, stay away.
But I went down the rabbit hole with Jami Attenberg and I can't stop thinking about her and her work.
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