All This Could Be Yours

By Jami Attenberg

Victor Tuchman - a power-hungry real estate developer and all-round bad man - is finally on his deathbed. His daughter Alex can finally unearth the secret of who he really was. She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra.

As Barbra fends off Alex's unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous married life. Meanwhile Gary, Alex's brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary's wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, bursting into crying fits in drug stores. Each family must figure out a way to move forward - with one another, for themselves and for the sake of their children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Release date: Mar 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781782835905

Jami Attenberg

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.

Reviews for All This Could Be Yours

[write5review · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Tentacles of Dysfunction

Jami Attenberg has a rep as the mother of dysfunctional families. In other words, she writes about crises that affect many middle class families in the U.S. Read her and you won’t feel alone. However, there’s more here, as there was in her quite good The Middlesteins, within which Edie sought refuge in overeating with no regard for the effect on her family. In her latest, All This Could Be Yours, an ironic title for sure, the theme is similar. Here, husband, father, grandfather Victor’s overall badness, his criminality, his brutality, his avarice, and his philandering affect his family in such ways as to transform them into a dysfunctional mess. The story moves along at a steady clip, with all revealed by the end in a sort of answer to daughter Alex, who wants to know what happened between her mother Barbra and father Victor. Better you don’t, advises brother Gary from far away in L.A.

Barbra and Victor have been married for years, she in her sixties and well tended, he seventy-three and lying on life support in a New Orleans hospital. It’s a death watch, one Barbra conducts by walking endlessly through the hospital corridors. As she does, she thinks over her life with Victor, how they met, how impressed she was with his forcefulness, how she got most all a person could wish for materially, and the price she has paid.

It’s this very thing that has turned her into an insular, cool person, and the very thing Alex wants to know. Alex, a lawyer, with a daughter, Avery, months out of a broken marriage, travels from Chicago to New Orleans not to make amends with her father, as her mother urges, for Alex’s own well being, but to learn this thing. She pursues her mother on the subject, but can’t seem to pierce her mother’s emotional carapace.

Gary, the adult son, has been estranged from his parents for years because he despises his father for reasons he reveals. A director, a second AD really, he found happiness with Twyla, originally from Alabama, whom he met in L.A. where she did makeup. He gave up his L.A. dreams for her and moved to New Orleans, well before his parents showed up from Connecticut, after Victor got out of financial and criminal problems and fled to The Big Easy. He adored Twyla and all was good until Victor appeared and Gary made the mistake of reading Twyla’s diary one time too many. (Yes, readers, he read her diary regularly taking cues from her wishes and hopes to constantly please her; the ying and yang of snooping.)

To sum up, it’s all a pretty sorted tale when it finally comes together deep into the novel. For people who need to know what happens after the drama ends, Attenberg includes a final section that traces the lives of the characters years after Victor’s and Barbra’s deaths. Also, she includes a non family member, the most likable in the novel, a strong black woman who wrestles life into a form that pleases her. She puts the final note to Victor.

Most should find this a satisfying family saga, even if the family is not apple pie American. Or, who knows, maybe it is.

[arosoff-513117 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a multifocal novel about a dysfunctional family that pivots around the deathbed of the patriarch.

Attenberg is a good writer, and I enjoyed the book well enough, but I kept asking myself, "why?" I didn't feel like there was enough new here. It's a fairly well worn plot, and while soapy revelations aren't necessary, the voices of the individual characters don't feel very unique--only Twyla really seems to develop as a character. The multiple points of view work well enough for the most part, but there are sections that are devoted to characters who are only tangentially related to the main story. I understand why they were there--there's information revealed through these points of view--but at the same time, their backstories that are given in these sections don't seem terribly well meshed with the main story. It read as if she wanted to integrate the novel into the city of New Orleans, and it doesn't totally work.

[narshkite · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I am shocked by how much I disliked this book. I love a good dysfunctional family story. Honestly there was a lot in here that was very relatable. The character of Barb is quite similar to my own mother. I can't count the number of times my mother told me that all she wanted was for me to be thin and pretty. And lord knows I understand how disconcerting it is to have complicated unresolved feelings about a father's death. (My father was a saint compared to Victor, but still not easy.) Deciding what you will and won't forgive a dead parent for is an inner monologue that never shuts up for long. This is something I understand, and therefore this should have been a great read, but it was not. These characters were all so stunted and inauthentic. I correctly guessed in advance most of the actions and reactions of the characters, not because they seemed the things real people would do in that situation, but because they were the things that people in bad television shows do when they have unresolved parent issues. Just so much cheap psychology. And Twyla, what the hell was that character? She was ridiculous. The whole thing felt, in the words of Tim Gunn, like student work.

[banjo123 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really like Attenberg's writing. She uses alternating viewpoints and a light touch, to explore a dysfunctional family and the abusive patriarch at it's head. Alex Tuchman has had a heart attack and is in a coma; we explore the reactions of his wife, son, daughter, daughter-in-law, and granddaughters. Parts of the story are also told by side characters. It is set in New Orleans, and Attenberg's love for that city is evident.I liked the way the book moves from past to present and glimpses of future, giving us hope that at least parts of the family can survive and maybe even thrive, despite deep dysfunction and betrayal. It's quite character driven, but i thought the plot was great.

[penny_l-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Family dysfunction galore! This is an expertly woven story of the lives affected by an abhorrent man. His toxicity effects not only his family, but everyone who encounters them as well. The full circle narrative features a lot of 'aha, I see what you did there' moments as the character's stories interrelate to create an unputdownable read.

[debann6354-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful writing, appreciated being enmeshed into the psyche of the family members, enjoyed the depiction of New Orleans. Just finished the book and feel angry about the end, not the very end but the chapter about Sharon. I felt like I was catapulted into a different book. A book about Sharon probably would be interesting but I didn't think it belonged in this book other than the description of the fate of abandoned bodies. The story up to that point and after was well done. Attenberg does a great job capturing the complicated emotions of and between these particular family members. I was just so thrown off by a character introduced just prior to the finish line when I wanted more from the characters I was already invested in.

[kayanelson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

TOB-2020--All This Could Be Yours was a nice simple read about an extremely dysfunctional family. But there was nothing spectacular about the book.

[nivramkoorb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is my 3rd book within the last 6 months that I have read by Attenberg. She is an excellent writer with good prose and an ability to get into the heads of her characters. The story is about a very dysfunctional family. The dysfunction comes from the father Victor Tuchman a 73 year old who is comatose in a New Orleans hospital after suffering from a heart attack. The book covers one day but does goes back in forth in time through the thoughts and actions of Barbara, his wife, Alex his divorced lawyer daughter, Gary his son. Twyla, Gary's wife and their grandchildren, Avery and Sadie. Without getting into too much detail suffice it to say that Victor Tuchman was a monster. He was bully, probably a criminal, and someone who had a profound negative impact on everyone around him. Attenberg does a great job of weaving the stories together, giving you a great feel for New Orleans, and incorporating the lives of the day to day people that came in touch with the members of the family. Although it is not a happy book it does have an upside as it shows what people can overcome no matter what. An excellent author and a worthwhile read.

[rglossne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Victor Tuchman is dying, and his family gathers in New Orleans. But Victor was a criminal, a brute, who has won and lost a fortune. We learn that he beat and abused Barbara, his wife. His daughter Alex is seeking to learn the truth about him in order to understand herself. His son won't come back from California; but his daughter-in-law is there with secrets of her own. Entertaining, well-written, for fans of stories about dysfunctional families.

[alanna1122 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was my last book of the decade and it was a very good read. Attenberg deals with some pretty heavy stuff in this book but it reads quickly and the plot was engaging.There were several lines and passages that I particularly liked. She did something in this book I haven't seen done before. In a few instances, as the main characters navigated through their word she would pause and spend a moment on the internal thoughts of incidental characters they interacted with. She did this in an effortless and really beautiful kind of way. I love that. The characters themselves were hard to like, I have read one other of her books so I was not expecting a slew of sympathetic people so it wasn't disappointing.I thought it was a good quick read with an interesting plot.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Her mother hung up.Alex waved at the bartender, who gave her a polite nod. "I'll have another," she said.They always do, he thought for the thousandth time in his life. Get on the phone with your mother at a bar and it's two drinks, minimum. He'd been there. He gave her a healthy pour of rye in an act of camaraderie.When Alex's father is dying in a hospital room, she flies to New Orleans to see her parents. She wants to know what her father did. Specifically, she wants her mother to tell her about her father's criminal past. She already knows he was an abusive, authoritarian and largely absent father. Her brother is not coming back home from his business trip to Los Angeles, leaving his wife to fill the gap. He has his reasons for staying away and they aren't ones he'll share with his sister. Her mother wants her to forgive her father, even as she prefers to avoid the hospital room.Taking place over a single day, this novel tells the story of an unhappy family, none of whom are particularly good people, although none of them approach the sheer immorality of the man in the coma. Attenberg's writing is wonderful and her love for the city of New Orleans is apparent.

[ellenh_28 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I didn't think I was going to like this in spite of all the great praise for it, but I did! These were rich, flawed characters that were captured so well in New Orleans! I may have to look at more of this author's writing.

[froxgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Meet the Tuchmans, two of the most despicable parental units in modern literature, put on earth to destroy their children and grandchildren with their violence, sexual harassment, and endless pursuit of living room remodeling. Yet the novel succeeds in amusing and horrifying the reader, with the addition of some seemingly random characters (a coroner, a roommate, a childhood friend) outside the family who fleetingly pop up and then depart, offering a welcome contrast to the terrible protagonists. The focus is on a sweltering summer day in post-Katrina New Orleans and the last breaths of father Victor, mourned by no one but mother Barbra (note spelling), and she's only sorry because the money stream, slowed to a trickle by a mountain of lawsuits, is going to die with him. Daughter Alex and son Gary, bolstered by their loving grandmother, manage to survive their childhoods, but divorce and their own demons make for a confusing inheritance for their daughters. The story is told from the PoV of every character other than Victor, and that's probably because his thoughts are too rancid to be put on the page. Somehow, though, it's a somberly hopeful book of clever dialogue and memorable confrontations.Quotes: "Residents who predated Twyla wanted to know her intentions with New Orleans, as if she were a suitor courting the city and they were overprotective parents.""Lonely was something you were born with. Lonely was about not feeling understood or heard."