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All This Could Be Yours Hardcover – October 22, 2019
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“All hail Jami Attenberg, the queen of dysfunctional families.” —Refinery29
“Big Little Lies meets Succession in the scorching heat of the Big Easy . . . Money, power and family are touched upon through Attenberg’s emotional, humorous and sharply written accounts.” —Parade
“This is how you write a very good novel about a very bad man.” —New York Times
From critically acclaimed New York Times best-selling author Jami Attenberg comes a novel of family secrets: think the drama of Big Little Lies set in the heat of a New Orleans summer
“If I know why they are the way they are, then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am,” says Alex Tuchman of her parents. Now that her father is on his deathbed, Alex—a strong-headed lawyer, devoted mother, and loving sister--feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who Victor is and what he did over the course of his life and career. (A power-hungry real estate developer, he is, by all accounts, a bad man.) She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra.
As Barbra fends off Alex’s unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous life with Victor. Meanwhile Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, buying up all the lipstick in drug stores around New Orleans and bursting into crying fits. Dysfunction is at its peak. As each family member grapples with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward—with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children.
ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS is a timely, piercing exploration of what it means to be caught in the web of a toxic man who abused his power; it shows how those webs can tangle a family for generations and what it takes to—maybe, hopefully—break free. With her signature “sparkling prose” (Marie Claire) and incisive wit, Jami Attenberg deftly explores one of the most important subjects of our age.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEcco
- Publication dateOctober 22, 2019
- Dimensions5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100544824253
- ISBN-13978-0544824256
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
A Best Book of 2019 from: Vogue * Real Simple * Kirkus * Buzzfeed * Time Magazine * Library Journal * Chicago Public Library? * USA Today * Vulture * People A Buzzfeed Book Club Pick * An Apple Best of the Month Selection * ABA's November Indie Next List * Shortlisted for the 2020 Tournament of Books A Best Fall Book Title from: Time * People * Entertainment Weekly * Salon * BBC * Buzzfeed * Refinery29 * Vogue * Vulture * Bustle * Cosmopolitan * New York Post * Nylon * Bust * Hello Giggles * USA Today * The Observer * PopSugar * Newsday * Woman’s Day * St. Louis Dispatch * Inside Hook * She Knows A Most Anticipated title from: Buzzfeed * BookRiot * LitHub * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping* Kirkus “Attenberg gets so deep into the psyches of her characters that the story ends up seeming electric with ruin, and with possible resurrection…This is how you write a very good novel about a very bad man…All This Could Be Yours is full of hope—but it is to say that the novel is most powerful when it’s in honest open battle with that which makes hope so difficult in the first place.”—New York Times “With her sixth novel, Jami Attenberg…secures her place as an oddly sparkling master of warped family sagas…All This Could Be Yours is orchestrated with the precision of an opera on a revolving stage…Full of brio.”—NPR “All This Could Be Yours is an engaging portrait of the unshakable connection of family.” —Vogue “Arguably Attenberg’s best novel to date…Attenberg’s characters compellingly offer a frank glimpse into the scourge of late capitalism and toxic masculinity in the United States…As family secrets unspool, the years of resentment and anger burn off in this tightly drawn novel.” —The Observer "Attenberg is a master at excavating the good, the bad and the ugly truths about families, and in this short but potent novel, her richly human characters populate a witty narrative studded with surprises." —People, Book of the Week “Complicated families are Attenberg’s speciality, and she more than delivers on that premise here.” —Buzzfeed “Told from multiple perspectives, All This Could Be Yours illustrates the heartbreak, isolation and chaos that comes from really getting to know your family.”—Time "Attenberg is never less than wise, hilarious, and deeply real about all the fundamental topics: families, love, death, money, and knowing when you can fix something versus when you maybe can't." —Isaac Fitzgerald “Attenberg is...a masterful psychoanalyst...she doesn’t flinch from digging into life’s messiness, pressing gently but resolutely into wounds to see what oozes out. Attenberg’s medium, as much as the written word, is familial dysfunction. And the Tuchman family is a matryoshka stacking doll of dysfunction. [This is] an emotionally messy novel, but precise in craft. The narrative voice is complex and profound...Attenberg writes with care about even the most glancing characters – a random streetcar driver, a Pilates instructor on a hike, a stroke victim sharing Victor’s hospital ward – her narrative touching so many souls, it’s like a spirit passing through.”  —
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The pacing came after the cigar and the Scotch. Both had been unsatisfactory. The bottle of Scotch had been sitting too close to the window for months, and the afternoon sun had destroyed it, a fact he had only now just realized, the flavor of the Scotch so bitter he had to spit it out. And he had coughed his way through his cigar, the smoke tonight tickling his throat vindictively. All the things he loved to do, smoking, drinking, walking off his frustrations, those pleasures were gone. He'd been at the casino earlier, hanging with the young bucks. Trying to keep up with them. But even then, he'd blown through that pleasure fast. A thousand bucks gone, a visit to the bathroom stall. What was the point of it? He had so little left to give him joy, or the approximation of it. Release, that was always how he had thought of it. A release from the grip of life.
His wife, Barbra, sat on the couch, her posture tepid, shoulders loose, head slouched, no acknowledgment of his existence. But she glanced at him now as he paused in front of her, and then she dropped her head back down again. Her hair dyed black, chin limping slightly into her neck, but still, at sixty-eight years old, as petite and wide-eyed as ever. Once she had been the grand prize. He had won her, he thought, like a stuffed animal at a sideshow alley. She flipped through an Architectural Digest. Those days are gone, sweetheart, he thought. Those objects are unavailable to you. Their lives had become a disgrace.
Now would have been an excellent time to admit he had been wrong all those years, to confess his missteps in full, to apologize for his actions. To whom? To her. To his children. To the rest of them. This would have been the precise moment to acknowledge the crimes of his life that had put them in that exact location. His flaws hovered and rotated, kaleidoscope-like, in front of his gaze, multicolored, living, breathing shards of guilt in motion. If only he could put together the bits and pieces into a larger vision, to create an understanding of his choices, how he had landed on the wrong side, perhaps always had. And always would.
Instead he was angry about the taste of a bottle of Scotch, and suggested to his wife that if she kept a better home, none of this would have happened, and also would she please stop fucking around with the thermostat and leave the temperature just as he liked. And she had flipped another page, bored with his Scotch, bored with his complaints.
'the guy downstairs said something again," she said. "About this.' She motioned to his legs. The pacing, they could hear it through the floor.
'I can walk in my own home," he said.
'sure," she said. 'maybe don't do it so late at night, though."
He marched into their bedroom, stomping loudly, and plummeted headfirst onto their bed. Nobody loves me, he thought. Not that I care. He had believed, briefly, he could find love again, even now, as an old man, but he had been wrong. Loveless, fine, he thought. He closed his eyes and allowed himself one last series of thoughts: a beach, sand bleached an impenetrable white, a motionless blue sky, the sound of birds nearby, a thigh, his finger running along it. No one's thigh in particular. Just whatever was available from a pool of bodies in his memory. His imaginary hand squeezed the imaginary thigh. It was meant to cause pain. He waited for his moment of arousal, but instead he began to gasp for air. His heart seized. Release me, he thought. But he couldn't move, face-down in the pillow, a muffled noise. A freshly laundered scent. A field of lavender, the liquid cool color of the flower, interrupted by bright spasms of green. Release me. Those days are over.
Ninety minutes later an EMS worker named Corey responded to his last call of the day. The Garden District. A heart attack, seventy-three-year-old male.
Product details
- Publisher : Ecco (October 22, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0544824253
- ISBN-13 : 978-0544824256
- Item Weight : 14.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #693,634 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,182 in Jewish Literature & Fiction
- #14,384 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #34,274 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

JAMI ATTENBERG is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up. She has contributed essays to the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, and Longreads, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on November 17, 2019
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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To me, All This Could Be Yours is Attenberg's best novel to date--not just because of the characters she's created, but also because of the way that she tells the story.
I love the way that she plays fast and loose with chronologies. As in her other books, she has a great gift for flattening out time, for giving you glimpses of characters' pasts, presents, and futures in the space of a single sentence.
I also love the way that she starts at the story's climax and fills in the details of what led up to it. I've often seen that done in movies, but this is one of few novels I can think of that's done it well.
Most of all, I love the way that Attenberg has incorporated third-party perspective by allowing minor characters to comment on the major ones. In interviews, she's said that that was a very calculated means of helping her to write about New Orleans and New Orleanians.
I live in New Orleans, and the city and its people are tough to describe. They're so well-known in pop culture and so unique that when writers put them on the page, they're likely to run amok. In no time at all, they've pulled focus from the main characters and plotline, making the story about this one unusual place. Then too, many people who live here are picky about the way that they and their hometown are characterized, and Jami's status as a relative newcomer would make some folks question whether she has the right to speak on the subject. (Of course she does, but they'd still question it anyway.)
So Attenberg cleverly makes the central characters non-natives. The city is as bizarre and alien to them as it is to many readers (and Attenberg herself), so they can be forgiven for their misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Meanwhile, she introduces minor characters along the edges of the story--longtime locals who see the central characters with a different perspective, who understand how they fit or don't fit into the fabric of New Orleans. Just as John Kennedy Toole did in Confederacy of Dunces, and Attenberg uses this technique to great effect.
In closing, and in full disclosure, I should note that Jami is a personal friend. However, I can say in all honesty that I'd love this novel just as much if I'd never met her. Her writing is unquestioningly beautiful, her characters and situations powerfully poignant.
Top reviews from other countries
I only finished for that reason. Otherwise would have stopped reading after the first pages.
It’s a depressing story about a dysfunctional family, none of them relatable or likable, full of crime, sex and violence.
Not in the least appealing to me.














