Author Jami Attenberg in Conversation with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

New York Times best-selling author of The Middlesteins, Jami Attenberg discusses the writing life and her new novel All Grown Up with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of the New York Times best seller The Nest. The event, presented by Live Talks Los Angeles, takes place Tuesday, March 21, 8pm at the Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre at New Roads School in Santa Monica. Tickets, $20-$55, are available at http://livetalksla.org

All Grown Up is a wickedly funny novel about a thirty-nine-year-old single, childfree woman who defies convention as she seeks connection. Maria Semple (Where’d You Go, Bernadette) calls All Grown Up “hilarious, courageous, and mesmerizing from page one… a little gem that packs a devastating wallop.” Named An Amazon Best Book of March 2017, All Grown Up has received rave reviews from Elle, Marie Claire, Glamour,Nylon, Book Riot, any more publications.

Attenberg has contributed essays about sex, urban life, and food to The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Lenny Letter, among other publications.

Who is Andrea Bern, All Grown Up’s main character? When her therapist asks the question, Andrea knows the right things to say: she’s a designer, a friend, a daughter, a sister. But it’s what she leaves unsaid—she’s alone, a drinker, a former artist, a shrieker in bed, captain of the sinking ship that is her flesh—that feels the most true. Everyone around her seems to have an entirely different idea of what it means to be an adult: her best friend, Indigo, is getting married; her brother—who miraculously seems unscathed by their shared tumultuous childhood—and sister-in-law are having a hoped-for baby; and her friend Matthew continues to wholly devote himself to making dark paintings at the cost of being flat broke.

But when Andrea’s niece finally arrives, born with a heartbreaking ailment, the Bern family is forced to reexamine what really matters. Will this drive them together or tear them apart? Told in gut-wrenchingly honest, mordantly comic vignettes, All Grown Up is a breathtaking display of Jami Attenberg’s power as a storyteller, a whip-smart examination of one woman’s life, lived entirely on her own terms.