Books Are a Place to Put Your Feelings: The Millions Interviews Jami Attenberg

Jami Attenberg, author of seven novels and recent New Orleans transplant, is a very considerate interviewee. I know everyone starts these little intros with gushing remarks; it just seems polite. But I was her third interview of the day. She asked which publication I was with, again? She told me she’d planned it out so that she would give slightly different answers to each interviewer, so it wouldn’t be just the same stuff on each platform—even though, she added, her publisher reminded her that “there’s nobody who reads all of them. Maybe your mom.” She said she’d once made a spreadsheet, after the breakout success of her novel The Middlesteins, in 2013, to track what she told each interviewer, and then her publisher told her this was insane and there were better things to do with her time. As a fellow listmaker, I was impressed and intrigued.

We conducted this interview over the phone, me in my windowless office in Madison, Wisc., Jami in her house in New Orleans. Halfway through, there was a strange noise and she told me that her dog was humping her leg. Then he started eating dirt. We continued the interview anyway, discussing grief, families, Jewish books, and the post-production side of writing and publishing a novel. This conversation has been edited