Book Review: I Came All This Way to Meet You by Jami Attenberg

It may happen that you are unfairly over critical with the fiction work of a writer. You turn the characters on all faces, analyse the context and the narrative, evaluate the angles and the writing strategy. May be disgusted by the characters and some aspects of the plot. Or both. You leave a disappointed review, sharing with the rest of the reading world what you expected from the author and how his/her potential was wasted. You hope for the best. A next time, but the next time your crawling is even bloodier and you end up with no expectations. Better for cutting short your disappointment.

But then, there is a memoir. A candid account the author personally chose to share with the rest of the world. A chronicle of disappointment, searching for home, love, happiness, you know, all those things that we, all, we are longing for. What can the critical reader do in this case? Share the disappointment that the childhood was not traumatic enough to inspire heartbreaking novels with a psychoanalitical fragrance? Or that was loveable than the character in an Austin´s novel?

When it comes to a memoir, the focus is all on the writing. Someone who writes generally bad, cannot hide behind metaphors in a memoir. Someone who is lying and faking will be easily disclosed as a layer and imposter when writing a memoir. A memoir is the end or the beginning of a literary career. 

I love reading memoirs of both known and less known authors. Because it helps to be more empathic with one´s fiction, with one´s person, it brings the author from the smiling pictures from the book promotion tours into flesh and blood and tears. 

I loved Jami Attenberg memoir too. I have been maybe too critical of her books, I did not relate - fully or partially - with some of her characters. There are a couple of books by her that would love to read. But I Came All This Way to Meet You is very different and extremely good too. But as I had access to the book in audiobook format, my book reached me differently. The good kind of differently. The memoir is read by Xe Sands and it gives the exact voice that I was expecting to hear. Isn´t Jami Attenberg who is actually reading? I haven´t heard her voice, but I will be very disappointed to find out that it is not Xe Sands´ voice. Better to never try it.

One of the things I´ve realized again when reading the book is that the fact that I may not relate so much with some of her characters - and partially with episodes shared in the memoir - is that the growing-up, coming-of-age in America is what makes it less relatable to other non-American people. There is a certain life journey, including job hopping and the all round the country trips and the NYC life that you have to experience it yourself in order to understand its vanity and wastness. 

But there are things - many more of us - that relate as all, all those looking for a certain meaning in the day and the past. There are the snapshots of a search for ownership: of her work, creativity, a home of the mind and of the soul. About learning about people and how to be in the world. About getting to learn other people, making friendships, female friendships and looking for the accomplishment in the moment. About her own ´Me Too´ episode, long before the movement was a trending keyword on social media.

What may be confusing, especially when you follow the book in the audio format, is the intertwined flow of memory, which is how memory usually works, not like a chain of events from 0 onwards. We need to learn how to live with our haunting memory bits and a memoir is the account of a writer trying to make her way through this constant assault of the past. 

After a decade and half of life in NYC, Jami Attenberg is currently living in New Orleans, my favorite non-American American city in the world. I Came All This Way to Meet You is the book I´m intensively recommending these days to both writing and non-writing friends for its honesty and humour and genuine kindness for the lived moment.

Rating: 4 stars