I CAME ALL THIS WAY TO MEET YOU
Writing My Way Home
by Jami Attenberg
There is comfort in reading the moment. No matter how strange or terrible things happen to the main character, we know that in the end he will be basically fine. The narrator got his act together, at least enough to publish the book. The impact is doubled when he recounts the moment in question, especially his story of becoming a writer. The existence of the book conveys a sense of inevitability over the writer’s struggle to become the person he was meant to be. Everything should be nothing more than a detailed exercise in fulfilled expectations. And yet. Such books hold an irresistible appeal, at least for this reader. We gladly follow as the narrator moves towards his imminent destiny as a writer.
Perhaps such books are best read by other authors – after all, writers are overflowing with a sense of inevitability. In his new memoir, “I Came All This Way To Meet You,” Jami Attenberg says exactly this: “I was born a writer.” Author of seven fiction books, including “The Middlesteins” and “All This Could Be Yours,” Attenberg has written a story that runs through many themes: looking for a place to belong; traveling the world as a woman; What it’s like to build a life without making the expected moves like getting married and having a nuclear family.
But booming underneath it all, enlivening the book is the organizing principle of Attenberg’s life: the urge to become a writer. She brings to the subject her gifts as a novelist: a fierce urge to honesty, a friendly gruff voice, and an interest in the complex, bumpy, and weaving ways in which people channel their desires. After making that bald claim – “I was born a writer” – continues with a kind of shadow thought in the next sentence: “I knew I was going to live with a certain kind of heartache forever, it was somehow ingrained in me since birth.”
Rarely are contemporary writers allowed to talk so freely about their careers; more commonly, we see a lot of discontent with the very idea of ambition. Attenberg’s goals, pride, and desire fill every page of this book. First, I found it a relief. The author has a finely tuned sense of his own place in the literary cosmos – and unlike most of us, he says it aloud, as in this passage from a teaching chapter in a Lithuanian literary workshop: “I am a new moderately successful writer. I have friends who are famous writers, I have friends who sell millions of copies of their books.” Attenberg continues: “I wasn’t like that. There were three cafes in Brooklyn where anyone could recognize me, and there was my family’s safe neighborhood in Florida, where my mother handed my books to every neighbor within spitting distance of the pickleball field. What did being moderately successful get me? A low paying teaching job in a foreign country. (It still sounds pretty good right now.)”
Most impressive is Attenberg’s take on a darker path of his own experience and sharing the story of an attack he endured from a classmate in his writing program, “I Came All This Way to Meet You.” It’s not revelation that makes this story so powerful; Attenberg’s slur on how the university handled the attack and how he wasn’t valued as a writer and how those two things are connected.
“I would graduate from this university with $25,000 in debt,” he writes. “I moved so far from my past as I could get that alumni fundraisers lost my phone number. … Even though I’ve published more novels than most of the graduates of that writing program, they never asked me to come back and talk. If they had asked me now, I would have read this chapter.”
All this was painfully true; above all, Attenberg’s rage – the wrath of the writer, especially the rage of the woman writer, who has been subjected not only to attacks but also to endless humiliations and injustices. Attenberg writes a few pages later that “as my origin story, it’s okay to be angry,” and I believe him. Many books—even very good ones—are written in the spirit of justification.
My main complaint about this is structural: “I’ve Come All This Way To Meet You” was organized as a memoir in the trials. That’s not automatically a bad thing, but lately a lot of writers (and editors) seem to be using this format as a way to escape the imperatives of true storytelling. The chapters are turned into pseudo-essays and organized around the theme, allowing the reader to decipher the resulting complex timeline. Attenberg’s story is sometimes read like a book running in parallel paths: There is an urge towards chronology, and this is disrupted by chronology-themed chapters/essays. (Note that In the quote above, Attenberg himself refers to episodes rather than essays.) His voice and frankness pave the way for what can sometimes feel like a labyrinth – but there’s something satisfying on the ground and we’re following it. And when we’re done, we hold the promised ending, the book itself.