The Deep and Beautiful Offerings of Being Alone

And so many other reasons to read Jami Attenberg's A Reason to See You Again

I hooked you with one of my favorite lines from this interview because getting people to read about fiction books they haven’t yet read….it’s hard! But I’m trying to get better at it, and authors like Jami Attenberg (and books like A Reason to See You Again) make that hard thing easier.

For my last fiction interview, I simply titled the piece “Lose Yourself in This Interview.” I wanted to evoke the feeling of immersion I experienced in that book, but also in crafting the interview itself. I wanted to invite you to that feeling with a gentle just trust me. And today, I’m doing the same.

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Fiction interviews are more challenging than non-fiction interviews, but I’m convinced we can make this one great. This book is a family saga and I found each of the characters at its core incredibly compelling (albeit intermittently infuriating). Can you paint us a picture of one of them, and how you assembled them on the page? 

I always start with a host character, who sort of appears in my head or ear or imagination and shows me the way into the story. In this instance, the first character was Shelly Cohen, and I saw her clothes before I saw her, when I was messing around online on Etsy during the pandemic. I saw this kind of big-sleeved, high-necked lace shirt from the 1980s, maybe some colorful ceramic earrings. I saw Prince, I saw Stevie Nicks, maybe there was a little of The Go-Go’s in there. Possibly a hint of “Designing Women” in the big-hairness of it all.

And I thought about who would be wearing it, and when, and this kind of “cool aunt” character emerged, talking to her family in the suburbs in the 80s. (A sister, Nancy, and her daughter, Jess, then emerged.) But also I very clearly saw her as a numbers person, like she was good at math, and it was important to her that she was good at what she did, and I thought, this person seems intriguing, and I had lift-off.

From there I figured out where she came from originally (Chicago), what she did for a living (that she worked in tech development, specifically the mobile phone), that she had traveled and lived all over (grad school in the Bay Area, recruitment to Seattle, work in New York), what her love life was like (hot, disastrous), and then I started to see through her eyes what her family looked like to her. Their stable suburban life as compared to her ambitious, hyper-focused, but yet still somehow floating existence. Sometimes they connect with each other and sometimes they don’t.

So I knew what she was like in the 1980s from a familial and social aspect. To better understand her trajectory I interviewed a few people, including people who had gone through the computer science graduate programs at Stanford in the late 70s and 80s, and had worked in software programming for decades. I also dug through online archives at Carnegie Mellon University Library’s Oral History Program which had interviews with women who studied or worked in computing in that era.   

And there were more interviews and research along the way, just to make sure I was getting my facts right. Because it was really important to me that as much as I was developing this character, this woman who starts out as kind of a punky, minimalist math nerd in the 1970s, who becomes entrenched in the corporate world and moves in and out of contact with her family, that one of the backdrops of this book be the emergence and ultimately the ubiquity of the cell phone. I wanted her job and really the thrust of her life to be about creating a system that would, in theory, help people be better connected and able to communicate with each other, even as she struggled to communicate with everyone in her life.

So I saw who she was first, who her family was, and then what she did or would do with her life, and then I did research to support it, to make sure I got the facts right, so that I could feel comfortable sending her into any room–and by “room” I guess I mean “scene” but also possibly “moment in time”–and know exactly what it looked like. I did this work so I would feel secure and could just let her be herself when she got there.

Reading the book I found myself thinking — maybe just because I’m an author, and an occasional editor — that there’s a different version of this book that’s 800 pages, one where each character and each decade takes many, MANY more pages to unfurl and the narrative becomes enveloping. And maybe it’s just my season in life, or maybe just the mini-season of reading I’m emerging from, but I absolutely loved this feeling that we’re getting a room of their lives, not the entire house. I can feel what another fight, another backslide, another interaction would feel like, but I don’t need to have it described on the page to feel it. 

Does that make sense? It doesn’t feel minimalist, or like you’ve cut into the narrative Hemingway-style, it just feels beautifully sufficient. This is my way of asking: how did you think about fleshing out character and plot? Was there a version in your head that was 800 pages? Was there an 800 page book that became this 200 page book? Please take this in any direction you’d like.

A-ha, you see the room metaphor, too! 

Well first I’m writing books that I want to read, and I tend to appreciate a slim volume more than I do a doorstop kind of book, though much respect to those who can write those, and a good book is a good book no matter the length. But this novel is about 70,000 words long, and that sounds about right for me. 

There was a version of this novel that was longer, about 18,000 words more, and which included a few more characters, and had more of a gaze on these other characters’ existence. Like it didn’t really expand the story of any of the main characters or change their trajectory in any way–there were just these other people we met for a while who interacted with the main characters, and they said and felt and experienced interesting things. 

I still feel like their influence is felt here and there, even though no one reading this book would know specifically how or why. And I had to write through them to get to the end point of this book. These kinds of cuts of characters are akin to people we have known in our lives who have influenced us for a brief moment in time but then we never see them again. They aren’t who we talk about when we talk about the stories of our lives, but life is long, and we meet lots of people along the way.

But I had to cut them to get to the heart of the story. I called it “the lean edit” and most of it took place over a two-week period when I was watching a friend’s house and cat in Portland in July of 2023. I just sat down and looked at the book and envisioned the core story and went from there. But I also said to myself, “If I miss these characters when they’re gone I’ll put them back in,” but I didn’t. I really like my books to feel tightly crafted. I give the reader exactly the information they need.

When I write my first draft I write it for me, and when I write my second draft it’s with my editor (and a few other people) in mind, and when I write my third draft I’m in conversation with an unknown wider audience. (First, second, and third aren’t exactly correct, by the way. There’s lots of little drafts in between. But I just mean sort of big movements or edits in the life of the book.) So when I’m in conversation with the audience I’m deliberately leaving space for them to fill in certain things or ask certain questions of themselves or tussle with what the character is doing. I’m interested in how we frame things can impact the gaze, and how what’s left outside of the frame can still exist in the story.

And I use lots of little tricks (or maybe “devices” is a better word) to fill in blanks or act as guideposts for the reader along the way. I use flash forwards, I reference historical or cultural touchstones, I have objects show up in one scene and then appear a hundred pages later. Sometimes jokes take two hundred pages to land, but to me the joke is present for those two hundred pages.This book is very readable straight through as a story of these people’s lives but I see it also as a treasure map, in its way. I don’t know if this will make sense but all of the story is happening all of the time in this book. 

So for you to feel like you got what you need from this book is satisfying to hear. I genuinely believe this book is as long as it should be. And that I have told you the story I have to tell.

Jami you are just *so* good at teen girlhood. There’s a passage about midway through the book — describing how a teen daughter (Jess, Shelly’s niece) is dealing with finding herself alone, in her house, on a Friday night in 1989 — that I dogeared so fast I nearly gave myself a paper cut: 

“Am I supposed to feel bad that I’m alone on a Friday night?” She said this out loud, just to hear the sound of a real voice. How am I supposed to feel about being alone? Is it like a sweater I put on, do I sink into the comfort of the feeling, the state of being by myself? Or am I supposed to reach out to someone else? To achieve a different state? She just wanted to know, Was this feeling she was having right?” 

When I was a teen, I loved being alone on a Friday night but was also grappling with this feeling that I *should* want to be with friends, so I could never fully enjoy that moment — I don’t think I’ve ever read a better description of trying to figure out what you’re supposed to feel while also trying to figure out what you actually do feel. And she’s feeling all these things, and then her Aunt shows up and scrambles some of her emerging ideas of self. Can you talk some about how you think of solitude, identity, teendom, the whole stew? 

I’ve written a lot about solitude not just in this book but in other novels, and certainly in my memoir. I am fascinated with the deep and beautiful offerings of being alone. For this particular teenager, I think she ultimately learns that solitude is something that can actually be quite comforting and fulfilling–if we can just get over the fact that other people keep telling us it’s not OK to be alone. 

Through teen girls we learn everything. They are the truth tellers of our contemporary existence but also they are the question-askers. And the answers we give our teenage girls stay with them for the rest of their lives. For better or for worse. I certainly wish people had been a little more careful with me in my youth. There is an examination of how we express (or don’t express) that care in this book, and how it can impact young women. And there is a lot of good (and bad) advice given. As an example, I am thinking of a high school guidance counselor who is cautioning the teenage version of Shelly against unprotected sex and says, “I don’t know if you’d be a good mother.” 

I think there’s also a larger theme of this book of people trying to figure out how they’re supposed to feel, and in fact, looking for someone else to tell them. There is some permission-seeking. It’s not just teenage Jess, but her mother, Nancy, who is obsessed with the self-help movement throughout the 80s and 90s. She is looking for something more spiritual possibly, but then she’s really just sort of ultimately mired in capitalism. (Early on she thinks, “She didn’t understand the stock market, but she believed in it.”)

And Shelly has a moment where she really tests her feelings during a breakup sex: “She was curious about what having sex was like when she was feeling the way she was at that moment, messy and exhausted and sad and a little needy…The answer was this: she felt like she was an egg cracking. Breaking and then her insides spilling out.” 

How are we supposed to feel? I don’t always know. I write books so I can try and figure it out.

I think many readers are just slightly too young to have grown up with parents who survived the Holocaust, but the book served as a reminder of how close the reality of survival (and making a life “worthy” of that survival) were for millions of Jewish kids growing up in the post-WWII era. I’d love to hear how you’ve come to think about the legacy of survival and how it shows up in A Reason to See You Again. 

A figure who is both central and absent in the book is Rudy Cohen, the father of Shelly and Nancy, and husband to Frieda. He is a Holocaust survivor who first made a living in America telling his story of survival in the camps, but watched interest die out. He is seen in the first chapter of the book. He is a hero to them: “I want him alive, thought Frieda. I must feed him. A frantic feeling. Him, she must take care of him.” 

He passes away soon after that. But his influence is felt on his entire family, his fears and stressors and struggles and triumphs filter into their DNA.  I was interested in how we can carry a desire for survival throughout our lives, seeing how it impacts us, the decisions we make, the fears we have, the drive we develop (or don’t). 

On a personal level, I was born in 1971 and my father’s father fought in WWII, in the Battle of the Bulge, and my great-grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants, but before WWII. So while there was not a thread of Holocaust survivors in my family, we still grew up with it as a backdrop, that our Jewishness was something that could be under attack at any moment, and that organized religion, our synagogue  and its surrounding community, was an important component of our survival. 

Now we’re living in a world where membership in synagogues has gone into significant decline. I was interested in having a starting point of that era, where one did not question one’s Jewishness, that it was a central part of the family life, a pillar of our existence, and watching it every so subtly dissipate over the course of the four decades of the book. Does that legacy no longer exist now that time has passed? Is it still a specter in our lives even as the internet corrupts history in real time? Again, I was interested in a specific starting point in the American Jewish culture. We can’t understand where we are now if we don’t know where we came from. I am constantly seeking context.

You were one of the first fiction writers who really publicly modeled writing as a daily practice (and daily labor) — for me, I know, but also for tens of thousands of others who’ve participated in 1000 Words of Summer. I love craft talk, I love the nitty-gritty of actually transforming what’s in our brains into something compelling on the page, but I also love the act of demystification. Now that this work has become part of who you are as a public writer, how are you thinking about it differently than when you first started writing? 

This is such a good question. In terms of what I believe works, that remains the same. If you’re trying to write something on a deadline or a schedule, writing 1000 words a day, consistently, multiple times a week, will help you develop the momentum you need in order to complete a first draft. The goal is to accrue words and to stay in the moment of those words in order to make it across the finish line. What you do with them is obviously another new challenge, but first you need to get to the end of the first draft and see what you can make of it. I wish after all this time that I had somehow figured out a simpler way to write a book but I am sorry to report the news: all you can do is get up every day and do your work. 

What’s changed for me is my understanding that people may not be capable of writing 1000 words specifically, and that 500 or 250 might only be within reach. Or they might only be able to find the time to write once or twice a week or maybe once a month. Or if you’re a poet, maybe you’re just writing a poem a week or something like that, and that’s actually a lot of work.  So “1000 words” has become more of a metaphor within the project for “a good day’s work.”

And also I am more drilled in on the idea that people write for all kinds of reasons. When I started #1000wordsofsummer, it was focused on finishing specific projects and I was in conversation with people who were working toward more professional goals. And I’ve now opened up the language and the thinking to people who might be starting out with their writing or simply interested in dabbling or just want encouragement to journal or whatever it is. Writing is so wonderful! It can change your life and your understanding of yourself but also it is such a playful and fun experience. And everyone should be encouraged to do it. If I can play a small part in getting people to show up on the page for themselves, I am delighted and honored to do so. ●

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You can follow Jami on Instagram here and buy A Reason to See You Again here….and sign up for Craft Talk below.