The heart wants what the heart wants, and our hearts want books.

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We’ve just spent a month reading books by and about powerful women, and it is not an April Fool’s joke that we have another coming for you today (read in March) OR that we’re reading a well loved title by a man, Neil Gaiman to be exact, for Virtual Book Club in May.  It could even be an accidental hint for May’s theme that’s been in the development stages for several months yet.  (Guesses are welcome in the comments and DMs.)  While Good Omens might read like a bit of an April Fool’s joke (no seriously, read the notes), I’m hopeful American Gods won’t.  Sign up here to join us on Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. CST and chat with us about what you think of this novel!

Like many titles here, you can file All this Could be Yours by Jami Attenberg under #blameAnne from What Should I Read Next Podcast, along with several of our loves.  When Ashley and I decided to pull this title from my hold stack for this month we were interested in the family drama overlaid with trying to figure out oneself and the New Orleans setting, but just wow this book!  Upon opening it up, per Ashley’s recommendation, I usually consult the table of contents.  In this case, it reads like the story will take place mostly in one day, so I was disappointed (see also I like more epilogue).  While most of the action does take place in a rather brief period, the epilogue doesn’t disappoint, and also, there are flashbacks throughout the book filling the reader in on the backstory of the characters.  This story follows Barbra and her family, as her husband has a heart attack, and then quickly passes away.  We meet Alex and Gary, Barbra and Victor’s adult children, as well as their co-parents and daughters, as they all experience various reactions to Victor’s hospitalization and passing.  

Some of Attenberg’s characters have redeeming qualities while others do not, but despite those in the not category, I adore Alex’s desire to understand her parents’ past so that she can have a better understanding of why she is the way she is.  Having read through our list of titles in March, I found myself in the shower one day wondering how quickly I could start therapy without causing breakdown-level chaos in the rest of my life.  Then I read this book and realized, while therapy is always a good idea, I’m not as bad as I thought, at least not compared to this cast (I’m way more Alex than Gary)!  There are more whys I wanted before these pages run out (Twyla!), but for the most part, before the end, Alex understands more than she wonders.  

By the end of All this Could be Yours, I don’t know that Alex has yet learned of Barbra’s life before Victor (unlike the reader), and we don’t even know much about Victor’s before Barbra either, but Alex finds peace with it all, more or less.  She still wrestles with the knowledge that her father is a “toxic man who abuses his power.”  That phrase from the marketing copy, is something Alex already knew, but finally Barbra gives her some details.  As Alex is processing her father’s mortality and still trying to unravel who he was, she acknowledges that she has and continues to benefit from the privileges her father’s power brought to her family.  This consideration of the ways some of us have benefited from the privilege of our ancestors, and even our parents, is a timely topic for a great many of us.  Alex considers how this knowledge could and should impact her actions, and isn’t that really the question for anyone with any sort of privilege or power: how we can work to bring us all closer to equity?  I don’t recall Alex finding any real answers, but there are a great many to be found depending on the specifics of one’s situation.

I would be remiss without stating the real star of All this Could be Yours is the writing.  I’ve already mentioned the way time is used in the structure, but we see from a variety of perspectives throughout the book to glean from memories that come back as Victor is dying, each with their own voice and it is such a joy how Attenberg weaves the story in this way!  I give this 3.5 stars, and while I’m ambivalent about a reread of this work, I’m very interested in Attenberg’s backlist!     

What books have you read made you think critically about your place in the world, and / or made you feel better about the level of chaos in your life?

~Nikki 

Let me begin with I really liked All this Could be Yours. I loved the ‘it happens all in one day’-ness and the flashbacks that have to occur in order to expose the reader to answers to all the ‘Questions That Need Answers.’ I really appreciate the way that Jami Attenberg uses the city in which she lives, New Orleans, as the character that brings all the Tuchman family members together. I feel cheated that I haven’t had her other writings brought to my attention before, like 2012’s The Middlesteins which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list or 2017’s All Grown Up which was also a national bestseller. So cheated. She has seven published books and has written for multiple periodicals about “food, travel, books, relationships, and urban life.” Now that she’s on my radar, I will just have to add anything else she writes to my TBR. Too many books, so little time.

This family drama is almost the tale of four generations of women and the men that, in one way or another, define their lives. We have Barbra, her mother Anya that we only meet in flashbacks, her daughter Alex, and her granddaughters Sadie and Avery. It’s a story of the things, both tangible and intangible that we inherit from our predecessors and what we purposefully and inadvertently pass down to our descendants. I like to think that in the title there’s an emphasis on the ‘could’ in All this Could be Yours, because at some point in the family line a choice is made to either accept or deny an inheritance. It’s these choices that come to define us as people in our lives and it’s no different in the fictional lives of the Tuchman women. I love the publisher’s choice of the front of an orange storage unit door on the cover. Not only does it represent the items that Barbra put in storage because of her downsizing and moving from Connecticut to New Orleans, but also the intangible inheritance she had yet to decide to share with her daughter and granddaughters: her memories, her knowledge, and her unspoken strength.

Darling Readers, you know I am loath to share tasty bits of writing that many would find spoilery, but I want to mention a couple of things. Around the 40% mark Alex reminisces about how her father loved the TV show The Sopranos. He loved it because he “knew guys like them growing up, real tough guys.” (Adam loves this show, I do not, and it is a point of contention in our household.) Let me be quite frank, Victor was just like Tony Soprano is in the TV show: a misogynist, a womanizer, and a criminal. I despise that television show, and if I would have had to follow Victor’s life around from his point of view I would not have been able to tolerate this book either. I do not approve of the example of womanhood or of manhood that The Sopranos puts out into the world. No one should treat another person the way Tony Soprano treats his family, his friends, or other people in general. He’s an all around jackass and Victor Tuchman is no different. Thankfully, All this Could be Yours does not glamorize Victor’s life, it highlights the terrible things he did for the heinous and criminal acts they were. 

On a happier note, the web Attenberg weaves with her supporting characters is a delight. When in a later part of the book a light is shown on how everything is connected, it’s an ‘aha!’ moment you shouldn’t miss (88%). And oh, the feminist theories that pass through the minds of the female characters are witty and heartbreaking and oh, so, true. I highlighted too many to recount but one is: “The amount of work that had to be put in to protect the self-esteem of men when women should be worrying instead about building their own. This was why men exhausted her so. It was a wonder the world didn’t collapse daily from the weight of men’s egos.” And, isn’t that what this book is about, too. How Barbra, Alex, Anya, Avery, and Sadie deal with the egos of the men in their lives, especially and specifically Victor.

Do you love a good train wreck…I mean family drama, and what about it speaks to you the most?

~Ashley

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