I Came All This Way to Meet You

Jami Attenberg is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up, a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You, and, most recently, 1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. She is the founder of the annual #1000WordsofSummer project, and maintains the popular Craft Talk newsletter year-round. Her work has been published in sixteen languages. She lives in New Orleans.

"[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)