All Grown Up
(New York, Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
by Jami Attenberg
For most people, moving to New York City is a gesture of ambition.
Page 1.
You just feel tired for some reason. Tired of the world. Tired of trying to fit in where you don’t.
Page 5.
You start to see the world with fresh eyes. But the world looks the same. Job, apartment, friends, family, view.
Page 6.
You realize all along you were just trying to prove to yourself you were still alive. But if I don’t have this, am I dead? Surely not. Please, no. You take a bite of your pizza and a sip of our wine and ask yourself the question you’re finally ready to ask: What next?
Page 8.
Where is my dislike button? Where do I click to scream?
Page 10.
In my head I think:
I’m alone.
I’m a drinker.
I’m a former artist.
I’m a shrieker in bed.
I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.
Page 11.
This is not a date; this is an audition for a play about a terrible date.
Page 12.
New furniture feels grown up.
Page 25.
Listening to other people’s dreams is boring.
Page 25.
I love food: at the weirdest, darkest, most stressful moments of my life, I always make sure to have a nice meal.
Page 36.
I’m always such an idiot after sex.
Page 38.
Sundays are the days I am the most me I will ever be.
Page 40.
I just wanted an omelet, not an assassination attempt.
Page 40.
I am obligated to make an offering … a virgin to the gods, a stuffed animal to a new baby. If I lay this gift on the altar, will you promise me I’ll never get pregnant?
Page 55.
“I don’t really have a relationship, though,” I say. “I have just bits and pieces of things.”
Page 60.
“This is what happens when you get older. You have to think about sickness and death and dying and all of that. I had to do it with |Nana and Papa. I was the plug-puller too, if it makes you feel any better. It doesn’t make you a bad person or a good person. It just means you’re capable.”
Page 68.
Everything’s a guitar solo when you’re playing by yourself.
Page 70.
Famous is hard, and anyway, you’re not supposed to want it; raw, apparent desire for it is disgusting.
Page 70.
“I’ve had enough me to last a lifetime.”
Page 72.
“In the morning we’ll have a new day,” she says. “That’s the best part of going to sleep. Knowing that there’s a new day tomorrow.
Page 72.
Whatever we both were back then we are not now.
Page 74.
I like feeling unsettled. So we sleep together.
Page 76.
We have sex instead, and it is even deeper and closer this time, as if he has crawled up inside my womb and nestled there for safety. I hold his face in my hands, and we look at each other and don’t speak, and the room closes in on us. I feel it, the world is shrinking, and there is just him and me, physically connected, as close to being one as we can be. Gross.
Page 79.
It was not a man who sucked the life out of me. It was a woman.
Page 80.
“The minute I felt unsupported I gave up. I saw that to be a painter meant a lifetime of not being supported.”
Page 80.
Marriage sounds like a goddamn job, and why would I want another one of those?
Page 83.
To my great surprise I am still alive on this planet. And that’s what we toast to - to still being alive.
Page 87.
Better to deny desire than to collapse from it.
Page 89.
My groin toils now just thinking about him.
Page 91.
To be an artist means a lifetime of being told no, with the occasional yes showing up just to give you enough hope to carry on.
Page 94.
I never thought about death, like \I do now. I never worried about dying. I only ever though about being alive.
Page 102.
Whatever thrill I had in perfecting my job is now dead, because perfection itself is boring: it’s only everything leading up to it that’s interesting.
Page 104.
At least I don’t have to be the boss of someone like me.
Page 105.
“I forgive you, Mom,” I say, but of course by saying this I am not forgiving her at all, because I’m bringing it up.
Page 114.
“It’s … nice to have something to believe in,” she says. “Marriage is a beautiful idea.”
Page 115.
A thing I know now as an adult is this: there is no one cooler than a teenager. Even at our worst, our eyes are so fresh, and we have just enough knowledge to approach the world with a level of sophistication. People who say they didn’t get cool till college or their twenties or whatever are incorrect. After our teenage years the game is over and we’re all just holding on till death.
Page 122.
There is not a person alive who doesn’t want something from me, I think. There is no action uncalculated. Nothing is free. Nothing is pure.
Page 125.
What I don’t tell her is she probably can do better than this job and she should get out now. But actually it’s a pretty good job for someone her age, it’s just not a good job for someone my age, and maybe the conversation I should be having is with myself.
Page 127.
Must every discussion end in tears? Must every meal? Must every breath? Right now, yes.
Page 128.
I go for a walk on the waterfront. I think about death on this walk, my own mortality and that of every person to whom I’m related. I stand on the end of a pier next to a construction site. This is how people used to do it a long time ago, just throw themselves off the edge of something, quietly, a lonely death, yet a romantic one, nearly heroic or t least bold, a big leap in the air into the distance, a powerful splash waiting for you, and then great gallons of water inside of you until you can no longer breathe, until you are sunk, your lasts thought perhaps: Will they miss me when I’m gone? But more likely simply: Oh.
Page 128-129.
No matter how much you own yourself and your body and our mind there are men who will always try to seek power over your body, even if it is just with their eyes, although often it is with their words and sometimes with their hands.
Pages 130-131.
“I don’t care if anyone sexualizes me as long as they remember me.”
Page 132.
Near rape, date rape, rape rape, it’s all the same, I think. Close enough is rape.
Page 133.
I don’t need to jump off cliffs into oceans to die, because every day there is a little death waiting for me. All I have to do is wake up; and walk out the front door.
Page 134.
Her life is architected, elegant and angular, a beauty to behold, and mine is a stew, a juicy, sloppy mess of ingredients and feelings and emotions, too much salt and spice, too much anxiety, always a little dribbling down the front of my shirt. But have you tasted it? Have you tasted it. It’s delicious.
Page 140.
It’s exciting to be around someone who has actual hopes and dreams and a specific way to enact them.
Page 145.
He promises to keep in touch. I feel myself shutting down to him
Page 148.
I am distracted by the world around me and my family’s issues and my lackluster career and how all the wheels keep spinning and I have never learned how to steer.
Page 149.
He hugs me and he smells my neck. I don’t even think it’s deliberate. He’s just a man who smells a woman.
Page 150.
A funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don’t want to get married: they don’t believe you. They think you’re lying to yourself or you’re lying to them or you’re trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse just for telling the truth.
Page 151.
I am accustomed to having my feelings and intentions be discounted by the world, but not in my own home. That’s intolerable.
Page 152.
We let each other go. I don’t know if it was worth it. I miss him. But I was never going to be what he wanted, and he was never going to be what I wanted. I was a girl but not his girl. He was a man but he was not my man. In that way we burned our love down.
Page 153.
No pen clicker is a friend of mine.
Page 160.
I always reel for a few days after I witness someone’s personal truth. I walk around feeling like I’m wearing their essence like a tight sweater.
Page 165.
There’s nothing waiting for me at home but my refrigerator, my laptop, and death.
Page 172.
But I cry … because it was a path I could have taken and didn’t. I cry for the lost idea, the lost concept. Sometimes I cry, too, for who I was as an artist and what my life could have been like if only I had kept going. I weep for my lost identities. I wee for my possibilities.
Page 174.
He half-asses everything in his life so brilliantly.
Page 186.
She kneels down next to me and holds me, but it is not for my sake, it is for hers.
Page 186.