The Amnesiac - by Jami Attenberg (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A brilliant, ingeniously structured novel about art, love, and deeply held secrets from New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg

What happens when, over the course of twenty-four hours, your lifelong aspiration suddenly goes up in flames? Who are you when your dreams disappear and how do you live without them?

In The Amnesiac, Nicole Abernathy has to figure out exactly that when her debut novel receives a scathing, career-detonating review. After she and her husband take a trip to New Orleans--to dance, drink, and forget about life for a while--they end up falling in love with the beautiful, crumbling city and decide to move there on a whim, leaving their New York lives behind.

But in New Orleans her husband's adventurous spirit begins to reveal itself to be something more surprising, and Nicole begins to wonder how much, exactly, he's hiding from her. It's time to come to terms with what she's really made of--as an artist, a friend, and most of all, a woman--and what it truly means to take care of yourself.

Boldly structured and spanning fifteen years, The Amnesiac shows us all the juicy, dramatic, and unexpected ways our lives can unfold.

Review Quotes

"Jami Attenberg has outdone herself with The Amnesiac. A sweeping, compulsively readable novel about why and for whom we make art--about lies we tell to ourselves and to each other--about marriage, loneliness, and the search for true community. Full of beautifully evoked places and characters you won't want to say goodbye to at the end." - Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or

"The Amnesiac is a potent cocktail of a story--complex, rich, heady. Bodies, houses, dreams, marriages, and identities will collapse, change shape, drift away, rush back in. Throughout it all, Jami Attenberg's prose remains fleet and nimble. A novel you feel in your bones." - Meg Howrey, author of They're Going to Love You

"Told with great compassion and insight into the human condition, The Amnesiac is both a heartfelt meditation on the willful forgetting necessary to sustain so many of our relationships and a moving evocation of the healing power of art." - Ladee Hubbard, The Last Suspicious Holdout

"I don't know a writer who captures the twists of chance and fate with more beauty and truth. The Amnesiac charts Nicole Abernathy's journey through all that is glorious and harrowing about being alive: the heartbreaks that threaten to wreck us; the doors that open to reveal a whole new universe; the ordinary miracles and the daily graces; love in all forms. This is Jami Attenberg at her absolute best." - Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise

"Ingeniously structured and scrambled, The Amnesiac mixes memory and marriage, New Orleans and New York, prop masters and prose maestros. Once again, Jami Attenberg brings her formidable humor, precise observation, and emotional acuity to a novel only she could have written."

- Teddy Wayne, author of The Winner