All Grown Up

"Growing up is hard to do."  When do you recognize that you are a grown up?  Is it when you move out and get your own apartment, when you get your first job and start supporting yourself?  In this novel,
All Grown Up, by Jami Attenberg wrestles with this very problem.  Andrea Bern is the protagonist in this novel about growing up.  She is a 39 year old, single woman living alone in an apartment in New York City.  She dropped out of art school years ago and took a job to pay the rent.  She has a series of roommates, lovers and friends who at different times in her life, marry, have children and move on.

She is the child of a feminist mother who works as an activist and a father who died of a drug overdose.  Her brother gets married and has a child and moves to New Hampshire.  Her mother follows her brother to Vermont to help out with the baby and Andrea feels deserted.

Attenberg writes this book in what seem like connected short stories.  It is hard at times to see how they are interconnected.  This is a book for the Gen X generation.  Maybe a chance for young women to see that the idea of equality between the sexes, sleeping around without commitment does not really work out in the end.  Andrea never really seem to find happiness.  She is an an example of all the worst behaviors of the youth.  Drinking, drugs and free love.  Taking a mediocre job to pay the bills and never trying to make a career with her art.  She is also very self centered, not being there for her brother and sister-in-law when they need her, and bemoaning the fact that her mother has moved out of the city to New Hampshire.

In the end this reader thinks the message not to be self centered.  Being single is different than being unattached.  You need other people in your life, you cannot live a happy life all on your own.  you also need to extend yourself to others, it cannot be all about you.  Andrea is an example of all that can go wrong with a self centered attitude and that is not being grown up.