About the Book

From critically acclaimed New York Times best-selling author Jami Attenberg comes a novel of family secrets: think the drama of Big Little Lies set in the heat of a New Orleans summer.

“If I know why they are the way they are, then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am,” says Alex Tuchman of her parents. Now that her father, Victor, is on his deathbed, Alex—a strong-headed lawyer, devoted mother, and loving sister—feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who Victor is and what he did over the course of his life and career. (A power-hungry real estate developer, he is, by all accounts, a bad man.) She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tight-lipped mother, Barbra.

As Barbra fends off Alex’s unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous life with Victor. 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, buying up all the lipstick in drugstores around New Orleans and bursting into crying fits. Dysfunction is at its peak. As family members grapple with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward—with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children.

All This Could Be Yours is a timely, piercing exploration of what it means to be caught in the web of a toxic man who abused his power; it shows how those webs can entangle a family for generations, and what it takes to—maybe, hopefully—break free. With her signature “sparkling prose” (Marie Claire) and incisive wit, Jami Attenberg deftly explores one of the most important subjects of our age.

Critical Praise

“Attenberg gets so deep into the psyches of her characters that the story ends up seeming electric with ruin, and with possible resurrection…This is how you write a very good novel about a very bad man…All This Could Be Yours is full of hope—but it is to say that the novel is most powerful when it’s in honest open battle with that which makes hope so difficult in the first place.” — New York Times

“With her sixth novel, Jami Attenberg…secures her place as an oddly sparkling master of warped family sagas…All This Could Be Yours is orchestrated with the precision of an opera on a revolving stage…Full of brio.” — NPR

“All This Could Be Yours is an engaging portrait of the unshakable connection of family.”  — Vogue

“Arguably Attenberg’s best novel to date…Attenberg’s characters compellingly offer a frank glimpse into the scourge of late capitalism and toxic masculinity in the United States…As family secrets unspool, the years of resentment and anger burn off in this tightly drawn novel.” — The Observer

"Attenberg is a master at excavating the good, the bad and the ugly truths about families, and in this short but potent novel, her richly human characters populate a witty narrative studded with surprises."  — People, Book of the Week 

“Complicated families are Attenberg’s speciality, and she more than delivers on that premise here.”  — Buzzfeed

“Told from multiple perspectives, All This Could Be Yours illustrates the heartbreak, isolation and chaos that comes from really getting to know your family.” — Time

"Attenberg is never less than wise, hilarious, and deeply real about all the fundamental topics: families, love, death, money, and knowing when you can fix something versus when you maybe can't."  — Isaac Fitzgerald

“Attenberg is...a masterful psychoanalyst...she doesn’t flinch from digging into life’s messiness, pressing gently but resolutely into wounds to see what oozes out. Attenberg’s medium, as much as the written word, is familial dysfunction. And the Tuchman family is a matryoshka stacking doll of dysfunction....The narrative voice is complex and profound...Attenberg writes with care about even the most glancing characters – a random streetcar driver, a Pilates instructor on a hike, a stroke victim sharing Victor’s hospital ward – her narrative touching so many souls, it’s like a spirit passing through.” — USA Today

“Attenberg explores violence, corruption, infidelity and betrayal – with a satisfying set of consequences.” — BBC

“Versatile, earthbound, and unforgiving, the novelist returns to the comic blend of messy family drama that made The Middlesteins such a smart best seller. This time, the madness swirls around the (sort of) grown children of the dying Victor, a tyrannical and very shady real-estate developer.” — Boris Kachka, Vulture

“While the plot of All This Could Be Yours only takes place over a single day — albeit a very, very long day — the stories told in the novel encapsulate lifetimes.” — Salon

“Attenberg is on a roll…[the] combination of ambitious scope and economical treatment [and the] spirit of unsentimental generosity, recall the divine Grace Paley, a comparison Attenberg has inspired more than once…Like a little chili pepper in the chocolate, that particular kind of dark laughter is Attenberg’s secret ingredient.”  — Newsday

“If you feed off of dysfunctional family drama that’s not your own, you’ll eat this up.” — Cosmopolitan

“All hail Jami Attenberg, the queen of dysfunctional families.”  — Refinery 29

“Big Little Lies meets Succession in the scorching heat of the Big Easy—that’s All This Could Be Yours, the story of a power-hungry patriarch on his deathbed and a family reckoning with a secret past. Money, power and family are touched upon through Attenberg’s emotional, humorous and sharply written accounts." — Parade

“A richly drawn pleasure.” — People

“All This Could Be Yours complicates the narrative of shitty men and forgiveness…By focusing on the women who Victor has harmed, Attenberg offers a fleeting world where even messy, sometimes-bad women deserve justice on their own terms…With at times painfully sharp precision and beautiful language, Attenberg complicates our understanding of and expectation of forgiveness and healing. For some, forgiveness looks like prayer and apologies; for others, it looks like never really forgiving at all; and, for others still, it looks like forgiving the self.” — Bitch Magazine

“[A] master of modern fiction…toggling back and forth through perspectives and time, Attenberg gives each character their own rich history making even tertiary ones—a Pilates instructor, a CVS clerk, a world-weary coroner—come fantastically alive, sometimes in just a single line. New Orleans, too, is its own protagonist: a place of sticky booze and Spanish moss and endless, swampy heat that also knows its own clichés, inside and out.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Nobody writes family drama quite like Jami Attenberg, and her latest novel is a dark, deliciously captivating look into the way a toxic patriarch can poison everyone around him. There are no easy resolutions offered here, but that's as it should be.”  — Nylon Magazine

“A smart, funny, beautifully observed family saga.”  — Southern Living

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Product Details

• ISBN: 9780358361336
• ISBN 10: 0358361338
• Imprint: Ecco
• On Sale: 09/15/2020
• Trimsize: 5.310 in (w) x 8.000 in (h) x 0.000 in (d)
• Pages: 320
• List Price: $18.99
• BISAC1 : FICTION / Humorous / General
• BISAC2 : FICTION / Literary
• BISAC3 : FICTION / Southern
• BISAC4 : FICTION / Family Life
• BISAC5 : FICTION / Jewish