All Grown Up

By: Jami Attenberg

Narrated by: Mia Barron

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Middlesteins comes a wickedly funny novel about a 39-year-old single, childfree woman who defies convention as she seeks connection.

Who is Andrea Bern? 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.

©2017 Jami Attenberg (P)2017 Recorded Books

A beautiful read!

I loved it! The story presented an insightful picture of life experience, through the relationships of family, friends, partners, and with humanity in general - through life, love, and death. For a male reader, not from NYC, and who typically does not read books in this genre, I found it extremely captivating and quite heartwarming.

Great storytelling about finding your life

This was the best great quotes to live life.
It shows how hard happiness is to find in a confused world.
Family is the only things that we can count on in good times and bad.

That is what I found in the book

Loved it

Great dialogue, humor, depth of characters. Light and heavy at once but never dull. So entertaining, and then turned a corner into tender when I’d least expect it. So funny, observant, wise, relatable. Sometimes this character got so out there I thought she was gonna lose it completely, but that made for good tension and somehow it kept me in a good mood. Such a joy to hear such realistic women characters.

The audio performance was astounding, stunning. This narrator, her tone and her various voices are pitch perfect. Reminds me of Maggie Gyllenhaal (Anna Karenina) with similar skill and heart and crisp timing.

The Tribulations of Andrea

Andrea’s thoughts are a hard place to be, even for the duration of the book. The novel is well-written and likely an accurate picture of self-destructive behavior and intermittent narcissism. I kept listening, hoping something good would happen or that when something good did happen, Andrea wouldn’t destroy, lose, or push it away. This is not a character for whom you feel sympathy. So if you need to like the main character, this book isn’t for you. That there won’t be a happy ending is obvious. Still the reader roots for Andrea. That the book would end abruptly with arguably the saddest possible deaths (literal and metaphorical) was devastating. Were there glimpses of hope going forward? Maybe. A teacher of literature, which I once was, would find the symbols and explain the beauty of the prose. So there’s that.

the characterization was completely realistic

I love the way this book has very realistic characters. we are all at one time single and experience things that only single people can experience. but Jami attenberg really brought everything to life the way you think the way you feel the way sometimes you even feel jealous or insecure and that is all okay. In all grown up the characters really come to life and you are sad and you are happy but in the end you know it's just reality that you have to accept. this book was a real can't say page-turner on audible, but I can tell you it kept my interest throughout. I recommend it.

Hopelessly Hooked on Attenberg

Attenberg writes characters so real that I know dozens of doppelgängers for each one. The protagonist in this piece is an amalgam of everyone I love dearly. She is nihilistic, narcissistic, anarchistic, misanthropic, borderline obsessive, slightly underachieving with at least a hint of mental illness and addiction. At times I was unable to stop laughing and others I had to hide the flood of tears lest my ex-wife/girlfriend laugh at me or even worse ask me to share my feelings.

Great story. And then it was over.

The book was real and lovely...until the end. I hate open ended books and this was one of those books. So frustrating! Great narrator.

that ending

compelling novel about struggling to adult. I never expected that ending. this will keep me thinking

I was totally drawn in.

Where does All Grown Up rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Excellent narration- excellent writing. All Grown Up is a better Sweetbitter- wry, somewhat damaged childless single woman with an on-the-verge drinking problem- but without the overuse of pompous language. Very well written, well crafted. I loved it.

Told in vignettes in no particular chronological order.

I liked this one

An unusual book. The first-person narrator is clearly somewhat disfunctional (indiscriminate sex, too much alcohol, few solid relationships) but she's somehow relatable and even likeable. She is also very witty, and the narration by Mia Barron definetely brings this out.