All Grown Up

"Andrea Bern is a single, childless, almost 40-year-old art school dropout working in advertising. She is remarkably good at avoiding her life – not taking on promotions at her job, not visiting her family while they care for a sick child – which can make her a frustrating protagonist. Regardless, All Grown Up is impossible to put down. Clever, funny and occasionally cringe-inducing, this novel is a referendum on a culture in which being a narcissist is more socially acceptable than being a single woman."

"Yeah! What I love about this book is it’s a character who turns 40. She’s single; she doesn’t have the career success she probably wanted to when she was 20. If I go beyond that, I’ll poke into the narrative and spoil it. But it’s important that people can recognise that success doesn’t always look like you thought it was going to look like. Having a partner is not always the highest goal that you should be striving for. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Jami Attenberg is phenomenal at building these dark, sympathetic characters who often are alone, but happy in being alone. They aren’t constantly searching for a boyfriend. Spoiler-alert: in my book, I spent my early twenties really thinking that if I had the right partner, I’d become the right person. I thought, ‘As soon as I find a person who wants me, then everything I want will fall into place.’ It turns out that’s not the case—who would have guessed? But reading Jami Attenberg, especially All Grown Up, really speaks to that in a funny and incredibly helpful way. Yes. It’s unapologetic in the best way. You can be single and live life on your own terms, without children, without the things that society says a woman is supposed to have, and be happy."