In an interview with The Awl about her new novel, The Middlesteins, Jami Attenberg describes why her decision to leave a more conventional career for the writer's life worked:
I don't recommend you go all in to a creative-writing career like I did unless you have nothing to lose by doing so. I don't have a family, for example, no future college educations or mortgage to consider. The only child I have to take care of is myself. For the past few years in particular my attitude has been: I'm already broke, what's wrong with being a little more broke? You sort of just get used to it. You watch everyone around you move forward in their lives in traditional ways, and you accept that you will not be on the same path, especially if you're a single person, which I am. You just have to give into it, or give up. It's not for everyone.
In early reviews of The Middlesteins, Attenberg's Jewish upbringing – and the book's Jewish characters – have been consistently explored. Adam Kirsch describes the eponymous family this way:
The Middlesteins: The name of the family at the heart of Jami Attenberg’s new novel makes an audacious quasi-sociological claim. Here, it promises, we will see the representative American Jewish clan, just as in Middlemarch George Eliot set out to show us a representative English town. And the strength of Attenberg’s modest but effective novel is that she convinces us, sometimes to our own chagrin, that the way the Middlesteins live is, indeed, the way we live now. Here is a b’nei mitzvah featuring twins performing a choreographed hip-hop performance, a shul populated by families who are good-but-not-great friends, and a suburban landscape dominated by strip malls—in this case, it’s Chicagoland, but it could just as well be New Jersey or L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. There are no rebels, freaks, activists, or artists to be found in this novel, just ordinary people doing their best to lead happy lives and mostly failing.
In another interview, Attenberg details how writing the novel impacted the way she thinks of the Jewish community of her youth:
I don’t know if I necessarily set out to write a Jewish book, per se. There was more of a desire to write about the milieu in which I was raised. Even though these characters are not my family — and I think my family members would all attest to the fact that these characters do not resemble them — they are of a community that is familiar to me. It was where my creative eye rested at that moment in time. I think it was more about getting older and being ready to revisit the past with a fresh perspective. That said, it was fascinating to explore Judaism and my own relationship with my faith in this book, and I was so glad I had a chance to do it. I came out the other side a changed person, even if only slightly.
The Dish 