All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, Janelle Brown
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, Janelle Brown
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All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

Author: Janelle Brown

Narrator: Rebecca Lowman

Abridged: 6 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/27/2008

Synopsis

A smart, comic page-turner about a Silicon Valley family in free fall over the course of one eventful summer from the author of Watch Me Disappear and Pretty Things

When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for—until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune. Meanwhile, four hundred miles south in Los Angeles, the Millers’ older daughter, Margaret, has been dumped by her newly famous actor boyfriend and left in the lurch by an investor who promised to revive her fledgling post-feminist magazine, Snatch. Sliding toward bankruptcy and dogged by creditors, she flees for home where her younger sister Lizzie, 14, is struggling with problems of her own. Formerly chubby, Lizzie has been enjoying her newfound popularity until some bathroom graffiti alerts her to the fact that she’s become the school slut.

The three Miller women retreat behind the walls of their Georgian colonial to wage battle with divorce lawyers, debt collectors, drug-dealing pool boys, mean girls, country club ladies, evangelical neighbors, their own demons, and each other, and in the process they become achingly sympathetic characters we can’t help but root for, even as the world they live in epitomizes everything wrong with the American Dream. Exhilarating, addictive, and superbly accomplished, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything crackles with energy and intelligence and marks the debut of a knowing and very funny novelist, wise beyond her years.

About The Author

Janelle Brown is a freelance journalist who writes for the New York Times, Vogue, Wired, Elle, and Self, among other publications, and was formerly a senior writer for Salon. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles. This is her first novel.

Reviews

Goodreads review by jillian on December 25, 2008

This book is another testament to American wealth, and the relative terms in which it is viewed. In the first chapter, Janice Miller discovers her husband's company's IPO will make them millionaires - $300 million, to be exact. More money than anyone can imagine. Suddenly, with that number in the fo......more

Goodreads review by Michael on June 20, 2011

The women of the Miller family are all falling apart. On the day her husband's company offers its IPO, their stock holdings rocket up in price, making them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Janice is hoping that this culmination of years of hard work will be the spark their marriage needs to get back......more

Goodreads review by Ginacjones on September 05, 2008

I was disappointed by this book. I realize it is a satire but the story could stand at least a few comic, lighthearted moments. I found the story line depressing and it didn't let up - - I wanted to at least have a triumphant ending but it didn't happen. This book gave me nothing - not even entertai......more

Goodreads review by Jalyn on July 09, 2017

Brief summary Janice is overly critical of her daughters and handles her impending divorce with alcohol and drugs. Her oldest daughter, Margaret, has just split with her famous boyfriend of 3 years (who is now dating another movie star), her magazine is going under and she's on the verge of bankruptc......more

Goodreads review by Kari on July 29, 2009

It's hard for me to identify with this woman's life - a woman whose husband becomes a multibillionaire, ditches his wife whose oldest daughter is going bankrupt and 15-year old daughter is sleeping around trying to find love. So, the mom starts using meth to cope. She has the willpower at the end to......more

Quotes

Praise for All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

“A withering Silicon Valley satire . . . From the ashes of their California dreams, the three [women] must learn to talk to each other instead of past each other, and build a new, slightly more realistic existence—but not without doses of revenge and hilarity. Brown's hip narrative reads like a sharp, contemporary twist on The Corrections.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A razor-sharp critique of the absurd expectations that, these days, have come to stand for ambition, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything is wrenching, riveting, and still manages to be great fun. This is a wise, intimate chronicle of one family’s struggle to take off their masks and live in the place they most feared: the real, imperfect world.”—Meghan Daum, author of The Quality of Life Report

“Rarely does a first novelist write with such confidence and grace. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything is a marvelous book.”—Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

“Janelle Brown's beautiful debut explores the tiny fissures in our lives and what happens when those fissures erupt into chasms. Excruciatingly funny, unrelentingly painful—this extraordinary book gives us something only the best novels can: a glimpse of what it means to be human.”—Katherine Taylor, author of Rules for Saying Goodbye

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