All We Ever Wanted Was Everything: A Novel [Paperback]

On the day Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, he informs his wife, Janice, that their marriage is over and that the new fortune is his alone. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the Miller’s older daughter, Margaret, has been dumped by her hot actor boyfriend and is failing at her job, kind of spectacularly. Sliding toward bankruptcy, Margaret bails and heads for home, where her confused and lonesome teenage sister, Lizzie, is struggling with problems of her own: She’s become the school slut.

From behind the walls of their Georgian colonial bunker, the Miller women wage battle with divorce lawyers, debt collectors, drug-dealing pool boys, evangelical neighbors, and country club ladies–and in the process all illusions and artifice fall away, forcing them to reckon with something far scarier and more consequential: their true selves.
“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 onThe 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 Everythingis 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 ofThe Quality of Life Report

“Rarely does a first novelist write with such confidence and grace.All We Ever WantedWas Everythingis a marvelous book.”—Ayelet Waldman, author ofLove and Other Impossible Pursuits

“Janelle Brown's beautiful debutl£P