All Grown Up (Attenberg) - Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available: in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for All Grown Up…then take off on your own:

1. How would you describe Andrea Bern and, especially, her life as a single woman in New York? Some 50 years after first-wave feminism, is she a throw-back to those early days; in other words, is her choice of being single and childless still "defying convention"?

2. What role has art played in Andrea's life? Why has she forsaken it? What do you think of her fascination, maybe even compulsion, to draw the Empire State Building over and over. Can you think of any symbolic significance her repeated drawing might have?

3. Talk about her relationships to her family. How would describe her upbringing in New York? In what way have those earlier years shaped her present life, left her adrift? 

4. Can a case be made for her to abandon her brother and wife when they need her most? Why does it take a year-and-a-half for her to visit them in New Hampshire?

5. Talk about Greta's outpouring of misery when she and Andrea have lunch together at Balthazar. What do you think of Andrea's response? Is she capable of empathy? She reaches out to help a stranger that day but not Greta, who has been always kind to her.

6. Andrea seems to live life on her own terms, unapologetically. Is that something to admire, something to strive for?

7. Read and comment on the passage below: Why does Andrea have a "problem" with what other people accept as a normal, even desirable, outcome in life?

Other people you know have no problem at all with succeeding at their careers and buying apartments and moving to other cities and falling in love and getting married and hyphenating their names and adopting rescue cats and, finally, having children.

8. Does Andrea evolve toward the end of the novel? Does she grow, learn, mature? Do you end up rooting for her…or not?

9. Jami Attenberg's novel is akin to a series of linked stories. Does that structure appeal to you?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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