“[A] fierce memoir of personal transformation.” — USA Today

 

“I Came All This Way to Meet You details the highs and lows of finding yourself through your work and living a creative life—it’s a thrill for superfans and newcomers alike.” — Vogue

 

“Remarkable...It’s overwhelming, beautiful stuff, though always full of living, just as effective on love and promise...At some point, [Attenberg] picks up Just Kids, Patti Smith’s rightly-praised, luminescent classic about being young and brave in the New York of the early 1970s, and you can feel Attenberg revving and spinning outward from there, into a similar kind of messy, glorious ramble that also unfolds in New York (she lives for years in Brooklyn), but then New Orleans, Sicily, small bookstores across the West and most compellingly, her Midwestern youth." — Chicago Tribune

 

“[Attenberg’s] writing…shimmers with keen pragmatic observations as well as deeply perceptible humane empathy . . . I Came All This Way to Meet You is a book about the making of a writer in the best possible way – accessible, funny, illuminating. It’s a book about kindness and grief, joy and forgiveness, failures, challenges, mistakes, and hope. It’s also a terrific ode to good art and true friendship.” — Boston Globe

 

“[Attenberg] brings to the subject her gifts as a novelist: a fierce impulse toward honesty, a companionably cranky voice and an interest in the complicated, bobbing and weaving ways in which people navigate their desires. . . . Her voice and her frankness lead the way through what can sometimes feel like a maze — but the satisfactions are thick on the ground, and we follow. And when we are finished, we hold in our hands the promised ending, the book itself.” — Claire Dederer,  New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

 

“Ultimately, her memoir is about what it is like not to have, nor even much to want, all the things that are supposed to make a woman complete. . . . [Attenberg’s] memoir is, in other words, a powerful antidote to pernicious fantasies of the tulle-skirt-and-soya-latte kind. . . . She’s very funny, and it’s this that makes her marvelous.” — The Guardian

 

“In this latest work, novelist Attenberg (The Middlesteins; Saint Mazie) bravely shares the many lives she has lived at once—jobs held, identities navigated, homes left and returned to, hopes lost and found—all in order to support and sustain herself as a writer. . . . What Attenberg has learned about being a writer and a human offers a valuable lesson for readers seeking wholeness, healing, self-expression, and strength. The result is a humorous memoir of transformation that will delight a range of readers.” — Library Journal (starred review)

 

“To say this book was a delight to read is putting it lightly.” — The Brooklyn Rail

 

“Reading Jami Attenberg is like hanging out with a friend who encourages you— through their own example—to be your messy, vibrant, glorious self. Attenberg’s voice is equal parts wise auntie and wise-ass, whether on social media or in any of her seven increasingly well-received novels." — BookPage (Starred)

 

“I Came All This Way to Meet You—which features the shining prose that characterizes Attenberg's fiction, while allowing us a glimpse behind the curtain of her process and her personal history—is one of the most artistically invigorating books I've read in years. It made me want to sit down and write.” — Liz Moore, author of Long Bright River

 

“I Came All This Way to Meet You is the story of someone for whom writing has always been a lifeline.... To meet Jami Attenberg on this journey is a delightful and compelling experience...To meet Jami Attenberg on this journey is a delightful and compelling experience.” — Bookreporter

 

“When Attenberg writes about the past, she does so with the kind of hindsight and self-awareness only possible after deep reflection over events in your life countless times over and from varying — conflicting, even — angles.” — Gambit