Jami Attenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of six novels and one short-story collection. She's probably best known for her novel, "The Middlesteins." Attenberg has shifted gears with her latest book. It's a memoir called "I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home."
The book delivers an intimate and enlightening look at both her personal life and her writing life. Through free-flowing prose, Attenberg takes us inside the life of her mind and courageously shares the ups and downs of her life.
There is one constant throughout — her core identity as a writer and an artist. Attenberg also writes candidly about how she adopted some of her father's salesman techniques to advocate for herself and her work.
"Honestly, I never wanted to write a memoir," she told WPR's "BETA."
"If you had asked me three years ago, I would have said never, ever, ever, would I do it. All of a sudden, I had all these stories that I wanted to tell," Attenberg continued. "I was about to turn 50. I wanted to collect all my thoughts into one place — reflections, especially on being a writer and an artist and a creative person — and see what I've learned and kind of recognize the mistakes that I made and the lessons that I could glean from them. And it just made perfect sense at the time that I should suddenly start to write this thing. As it is with most creative projects that I start, it just it didn't seem like it made sense until it did."
The title of Attenberg's memoir perfectly captures the intimate tone of her book. You feel like she's a good friend that you've known for years and that she's writing just to you. So why did she choose these words for the title?
"Well, 'I came all this way to meet you' is actually a sentence from the book, that shows up late in the book where I'm walking through an ossuary in Naples."
The passage is: "As I walked through, I thought: I came all this way to meet you. Hello, hello. The ossuary felt earthy, organic, and alive."
Attenberg explained that there are a few moments in the book where she explores otherworldly places — cemeteries, ossuaries, catacombs, thinks like that. She also contemplates and writes about ghosts.
"It only happened a few years ago," she said. "I was more peaceful. I was more calm at that moment, and I just was saying 'hi' to the ghosts as I was walking through the ossuary. That was that moment that popped out at me...The book is about finding myself too and also finding all the people in my life that I love. And so it does a lot of work, that title."
Attenberg has said that she's finding it so much more difficult to talk about memoir than her fiction because there are no characters to hide behind. But she said it was tricky to write without those characters between her and the pages.
"It's really tricky," she said. "Fiction is a great place for a person to hide, and the characters, you spend a lot of time getting to know them and you love them and hate them sometimes, too. It's like gossiping about someone, which is one of my favorite things to do. I love to gossip. I think of fiction writing as just basically gossiping about characters. So I can do that all day, really. But gossiping about myself is a different story."
There's a lot of humor in Attenberg's memoir, but there are also very serious moments about the sacrifices she's made in pursuit of a creative life.
Attenberg's memoir includes a powerful passage about grief: "Grief can be forever. We are taught to seek closure in this country, we are encouraged to move on quickly. We are judged, possibly, for not getting over things fast enough, but grief can be for your whole life."
"What I'm writing about is the grief of my mother, who's lost her parents when she was young and how that had impacted me and how I watched her travel with her and her life," Attenberg told "BETA."
Attenberg said that writing moments between mothers and daughters will always be her most beloved territory.
"I get a kick out of listening to mothers and daughters, talk to each other. I definitely have a fun mom to talk to. She's very raw and she's very smart," she said.
"But I think that mothers and daughters, from my perspective anyway, have a particular kind of closeness. And yet they challenge each other and they're like each other and yet can be different, too. And I don't know, it's different than talking to a dad and it's different than talking to a sibling. It's your mom, (and she) kind of just knows you and in a specific kind of way."
She said that she's been very fortunate that she hasn't really lost people who are close to her, but there are still things that she mourns.
"I write through everything, whether it's in fiction or nonfiction, and I hope that I carry it well. I hope that I don't allow the sadness of my life to get in the way of me being the best version of myself."
Attenberg believes a person must "arrive at an intersection of hunger and fear to make great art," as she wrote in her memoir.
"Whenever I'm not writing, I wish that I were writing. But also, you can't always be writing. Your brain needs rest. And then at some point, there's kind of this trigger moment where my brain is like, 'Enough rest, I must write,' you know, 'I have to succeed, I have to be making something happen.'"
"And that's kind of that hunger. And then the fear is just sort of like sitting still; your life stays exactly the same. I don't want my life to ever be too dull or too slow. I always want to be kind of in motion."
So what has Attenberg learned about herself from writing "I Came All This Way to Meet You"?
"Oh my gosh. Okay, you're only the second person to ask me that. And the first time I was like, 'I don't know.' But I do know."
"I did realize that I like myself a little bit more than I thought I did. That was kind of a big revelation. I looked at the end and I thought, 'All right, I've made all these mistakes. I'm not a terrible person. I'm an at least an okay person.' And that was important for me to realize that I had done some okay things with my life too, and that I'd accomplished things."
"And that wasn't why I set out to write the book at all. I wrote the book because I had these stories inside of me that I was dying to tell. That's why I write any book, is because it's in me and it has to get out. It's not a cathartic moment, it's just I feel a little bit more comfortable with myself after writing this book."