In her new novel, All This Could Be Yours, Jami Attenberg examines a family emerging from the shadow of their power-hungry patriarch. She spoke to Electric Literature about how familial identity passes down—and sometimes doesn’t. “The kids in this book, Alex and Gary, have made a series of conscious choices in their life to physically move as far away from their parents as possible,” she says. “They didn’t want to connect their adulthood to their childhood. Over the course of the book, they’re forced to contemplate their parents—their father is in the hospital, on the verge of death—and I was interested in seeing how these two characters, who have done everything they can to walk away from their family, consider their parents, again, and see if they’re anything like them.”
Jami Attenberg on the Call of Family
