Jami Attenberg is an author I’ve followed since I came across her novel All Grown Up in 2017. She writes great books and is a very active literary citizen, with a newsletter and an annual writing motivational session, #1000DaysOfSummer, which also has other mini versions throughout the year.

Today, she offered a prompt for a writer to figure out their personal and honest story. Here is hers:

Dealing with (and loving) complicated families, how women are treated (and how they treat each other), American life in all its glory and shame, a certain kind of contemporary Jewishness, a certain kind of fading Gen X horniness, so much emotional messiness, getting old but still feeling young, making a home for yourself wherever you are, loving thy neighbors (appropriately).

Mine could be: The meaning and purpose of human life in a huge universe that might be multitudinous, and alongside many unknown scientific mysteries such as Quarks, and yet the possibility of spiritual reality. The frustration that most of the world’s violence and greed is perpetrated by men who behave like nothing more than aggressive, carnivorous primates still fighting in the trees of Africa, and yet those same people are the ones most likely to deny evolution or deny women’s bodily autonomy and all kinds of things. The difference between them in their suits or religious garbs and the proverbial monkeys is almost zilch. There are many Venn diagrams of these ills and I like to look at the cross-sections and try to stay outside of them. Adjacently: music, nightclubbing, live shows of rock n roll and blues and other music; horses, goats, donkeys and cats; food, cooking, drink, and coffee. If reincarnation is real, appreciating the life you are living right now and empathizing with others who drew a short straw in some respects this time around (though no doubt they are richer in other ways too!), knowing that you may draw the short straw next time.