A Conversation with Jami Attenberg From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast

You're listening to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture podcast. I'm Alicia Kennedy, a food writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Every week on Wednesdays, I'll be talking to different people in food and culture about their lives, careers and how it all fits together and where food comes in. 
Today, I'm talking to Jami Attenberg, the author of seven novels, including the best-selling The Middlesteins. Her latest book is a memoir called I Came All This Way to Meet You, which grapples with ideas of success and living a nontraditional life. We talk about the ups and downs of the writing life, along with her move from New York to New Orleans, why she chose to write a memoir right now, and how the pandemic has shifted her relationship to travel.
You're listening to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture podcast. I'm Alicia Kennedy, a food writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Every week on Wednesdays, I'll be talking to different people in food and culture about their lives, careers and how it all fits together and where food comes in. 
Today, I'm talking to Jami Attenberg, the author of seven novels, including the best-selling The Middlesteins. Her latest book is a memoir called I Came All This Way to Meet You, which grapples with ideas of success and living a non-traditional life. We talk about the ups and downs of the writing life, along with her move from New York to New Orleans, why she chose to write a memoir right now, and how the pandemic has shifted her relationship to travel. 
Alicia: Hi, Jami. Thank you so much for being here. 
Jami: Hi. It's so nice to meet you.
Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
Jami: Yeah, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I’m 50, so I grew up in the ’70s. And I'm Jewish, and so there was an emphasis on deli when we could get it. There wasn't a lot of deli going on out there where I grew up. I grew up in Buffalo Grove. So closer to Skokie is where they, where you can get deli. 
And then, a lot of Italian food. A lot of pizza. I don't know if you've ever heard of Portillo's before. That is an amazing Chicago chain, and the Italian—Oh. I want it right now, just thinking about it. They had this croissant sandwich with Italian beef that was really delicious. 
My mother would be upset to hear me say this, I do not recall having a lot of emphasis on healthy food in my household growing up. We were also latchkey kids. You come home and you sort of scramble for what you could find in the house, that kind of thing. I mean, there was food there.
So, I don't know. When I look back at it now, I just think it was that there was not a clear path to, not a clear aesthetic necessarily. It was a lot of what was around.
Alicia: Yeah.
Well, it's interesting that you say your mom wouldn't like that. In your memoir, you write about her making chicken noodle soup from scratch and insisting she'd done it. And it's interesting, because it brings up obviously—memoir, where your memories don't match up with other people's memories and the question of that. How was it to reconstruct those kinds of things? I liked that in the book, that you enacted the problem of memoir in the memoir with this kind of like, ‘Whose memory actually is the memory that's the memory?’ [Laughs.]
Jami: Well, I have a brother. So I think he would back me up on certain things. And he's a wonderful cook, and he’s very health focused and really into the farmers’ markets and has a big tomato festival in his house every year. It was like a goal of his to kind of learn how to cook and be connected with food in a different way. I mean, I'm not blaming my parents for it. They had, of course, a million jobs and things going on. 
So I mean, I tried to be as honest about it as I could. I mean, I think my mother genuinely wants to have cooked, made chicken noodle soup for me from scratch. I do not recall it at all. I don't think that happened. So when that did happen, it felt