A Reason to See You Again is a spectacular novel filled with family, love, and forgiveness.
Jami Attenberg’s newest novel, A Reason to See You Again, presents a family portrait laid across four decades. Following the death of their father, the Cohen sisters, Nancy and Shelly, are quietly mostly left to their own devices. Their father was the primary pillar of their family, and in his absence their mother flounders, as her boozy tendencies muddy her days, allowing for little more than bare minimum mothering.
As the years pass by, Shelly and Nancy navigate their evolving futures: Nancy, married from a young age to a man with questionable integrity, finds financial security inside the loneliness of her marriage. Her daughter, Jess, finds a kind of big sisterly love in her Aunt Shelly, whose own life has produced a quite lucrative career in tech, a quite sophisticated relationship with her husband, and, ultimately, some ethics-related troubles on the work front.
Scattered across the country, the four women continuously circulate in and out of each others’ lives, ultimately playing out in all their interpersonal relationships the impact of all they learned from their family experience. Amid all the drama are real lessons to be gleaned about what it means to love and forgive and accept, as well as some very familiar feels to do with those kinds of connections that bend and re-form and never break under some of the biggest forces of all.
A Reason to See You Again
by Jami Attenberg
There’s so much to unpack within the covers of A Reason to See You Again. A lot can happen in one life — and certainly so much more in the lives of the women in these pages. Touching on themes of family, addiction, love, shame, this is a book you’ll be desperate to dissect with your book club friends.
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Following the death of patriarch Rudy, Frieda creates a routine for herself, to fill her days reliably with all the things that keep her in motion. On Wednesdays, following work, she dines at a local Italian restaurant, dipping into a bottle of Chianti and spaghetti and meatballs. It’s from here that we’re taking our inspiration for our pairing.
Frieda’s shortcomings as a mother are many, but not for lack of desire. We feel for her, struggling with the hand that life dealt her. Still, she keeps on going, eventually even creating joy where before there was none. With that, let’s raise a glass of this Frescobaldi Nipozzano Chianti Rufina Riserva. It’s intense, fresh, and easy on the intellect, in that it doesn’t demand very much at all from an already taxed mind. Dip in — but not before you’ve got our pasta pick in the works. Check out this spaghetti and meatballs recipe — it’s classic, but with a little added heat.
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Before Jami Attenberg wrote this latest novel, she let loose into the world a book called 1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round, inspired by an online suggestion she made on Twitter to do with holding herself and other writers accountable to write a certain number of words every week every summer. That suggestion took off, and so did the writing movement that followed. Want to hear Jami talk more about the program, the book, and all things writing? Listen here, in her interview with WNYC, and then, if you’ve got a simmering (or boiling!) desire to get writing yourself, check out the book. Oh, and bonus: If you can’t get enough of Jami and all things to do with her craft, be sure to check out her Substack, Craft Talk.
1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round
by Jami Attenberg