The blurb for Jami Attenberg’s fifth novel, about a single, childless 39-year-old New Yorker, makes it sound like ideal reading for a 40-year-old, childless, London-based book reviewer. The novel, we are promised, will pose such questions as “What if I don’t want to hold your baby?” “Can I date you without ever hearing about your divorce?” and “Why does everybody keep asking me why I’m not married?” So far, so Carrie Bradshaw? Maybe, but that’s where the similarity ends.

If All Grown Up is like any recent single-woman-about-town fiction, it is not Sex and the City or Bridget Jones’s Diary, but Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s darkly comic series Fleabag, which appeared on BBC3 last year, with its solitary, uncompromising heroine, her damaged past gradually revealed, and her knowing looks to camera. The literature of sex and the single woman has been in the doldrums since Carrie got married and Bridget had her baby, so three cheers for this warts-and-all portrait of a woman trying to find her place in the world and in her own nuclear family now she is all grown up.

Attenberg’s novels include 2015’s Saint Mazie, whose heroine lived life on her own terms, and 2012’s The Middlesteins, about a family falling apart. Andrea has qualities of both: she’s an independent single woman with a well-paid job that bores her, an often hilarious sex life, and a family in crisis.

Her drug-addicted father died when she was a child. Her mother made ends meet by inviting men round for “dinner parties”. Andrea’s brother and his wife have a little girl who is dying. Andrea avoids the issue, until her mother moves out to New Hampshire to be with them. “I’m the sick baby, I think. Me. Who will hold me?” This heroine is difficult, selfish and sometimes cruel – as most real-life heroines are.

There is much humour, though, as Andrea navigates grown-up life. “This is not a date”, she says about one drunken encounter, “this is an audition for a play about a terrible date.” A friend offers Andrea her beautiful new baby to hold to cheer her up. “I would rather have a glass of wine,” Andrea thinks. An old acquaintance has “the intensity of a squirrel”. Another “a ponytail the colour of rotting lemons”.

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There is a book, Andrea writes, “about being single, written by an extremely attractive woman who is now married, and it is a critical yet wistful remembrance of her uncoupled days. I have no interest in reading this book. I am already single. I have been single a long time. There is nothing this book can teach me about being single that I don’t already know. Regardless, everyone I know tells me about this book.”

This is no such book: neither a critical view of tragic singledom, nor a sentimentalising of cocktails, gossip and girls’ nights in. This is a novel about how to step up when your smug married friend suddenly gets divorced, or when your annoying mum really needs you; about “being there” for people when you don’t even know where “there” is. It has hope, in spades.

Andrea refers to a good friend, who seems to have it all sussed out. “Her life is architected, elegant and angular, a beauty to behold, and mine is a stew, a juicy, sloppy mess of ingredients and feelings and emotions, too much salt and spice, too much anxiety, always a little dribbling down the front of my shirt. But have you tasted it? Have you tasted it. It’s delicious.”

• All Grown Up is published by Serpent’s Tail. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.