Showing results by author "Anne Lamott" in All Categories

“Love is our only hope,” Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. “It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks.” In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. “Love just won't be pinned down,” she says. “It is in our very atmosphere” and lies at the heart of who we are. We are, Lamott says, creatures of love.

We all suffer from unhealthy dependencies that we continually return to in hopes of having a better life. But after yet another TV show is streamed or another drink is swallowed, we find we once again feel worse, not better, than we did before. Where is the hope for that fully awakened life we long to live?

For a quarter century, more than a million readers and listeners—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title.

Listeners of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott’s funny and perceptive writing about her own faith through decades of trial and error. And in her new audiobook, Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she knows about prayer to these fundamentals. It is these three prayers - asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating what we have that is good, and feeling awe at the world around us - that can get us through the day and can show us the way forward.

In this profound and funny audiobook, Lamott calls for each of us to rediscover the nuggets of hope and wisdom that are buried within us that can make life sweeter than we ever imagined. Divided into short chapters that explore life's essential truths, Almost Everything pinpoints these moments of insight as it shines an encouraging light forward. Candid and caring, insightful and sometimes hilarious, Almost Everything is the audiobook we need and that only Anne Lamott can write.

In Dusk, Night, Dawn, Anne Lamott explores the tough questions that many of us grapple with. How can we recapture the confidence we once had as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak? As bad news piles up - from climate crises to daily assaults on civility - how can we cope? Where, she asks, "do we start to get our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself back...with our sore feet, hearing loss, stiff fingers, poor digestion, stunned minds, broken hearts?" We begin, Lamott says, by accepting our flaws and embracing our humanity.

With an exuberant mix of passion, insight, and humor, Anne Lamott takes us on a journey through her often troubled past to illuminate her devout but quirky walk of faith. In a narrative spiced with stories and scripture, with diatribes, laughter, and tears, Lamott tells how, against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. She shows us the myriad ways in which this sustains and guides her, shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life and exposing surprising pockets of meaning and hope.

It’s not like she’s the only woman to ever have a baby. At 35. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all-important first year. From finding out her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out her best friend and greatest supporter, Pam, will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events making up a woman’s life.

Leading us through the wake of these changes is Nanny Goodman, a girl living in Marin County, California. A half-adult child among often childish adults, Nanny grows up with two spectacularly odd parents: a writer father and a mother who is a constant source of material. As she moves into her adolescence, so, it seems, does America. While grappling with her own coming of age, Nanny witnesses an entire culture's descent into drugs, the mass exodus of fathers from her town, and rapid real estate and technological developments that foreshadow a drastically different future.

If Elizabeth Ferguson had her way, she’d spend her days savoring good books, cooking great meals, and waiting for the love of her life to walk in the door. But it’s not a man she’s waiting for. It’s her daughter, Rosie - her wild-haired, smart-mouthed, and wise-beyond-her-years alter ego. With Rosie around, the days aren’t quite so long, but Elizabeth can’t keep the realities of the world at bay, and try as she might, she can’t shield Rosie from its dangers or mysteries.

In each chapter of Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott refracts all the colours of the spectrum. She explores the unexpected love for a partner later in life. The bruised (and bruising) love for a child who disappoints, even frightens. Drawing from her own life and experience to delineate the intimate and elemental ways that love buttresses us in the face of despair, as it galvanises us to believe that tomorrow will be better than today. The lessons she underscores are that love enlightens as it educates, comforts as it energises and sustains as it surprises.

Rosie Ferguson is 17 and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She's intelligent (she aced AP physics), athletic (a former state-ranked tennis doubles champion), and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped she could be. But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham.

Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It's an approach that has become her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us - our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives.

The Fergusons make their home in a small California town where life is supposed to resemble paradise, but for 13-year-old Rosie, reality is a bit harsher. Her mother, a recovering alcoholic, is still beset by grief over the early death of her first husband. Rosie's stepfather is a struggling writer plagued by doubts and hilarious paranoia. And Rosie, aching in the bloom of young womanhood and obsessed with tournament tennis, finds that her athletic gifts now place her in peril, as a shadowy man who stalks her from the bleachers seems to be developing an obsession of his own. 

"Mercy is radical kindness", Anne Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It's the permission you give others - and yourself - to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult. In Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy Lamott ventures to explore where to find meaning in life. We should begin, she suggests, by "facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves". It's up to each of us to recognize the presence and importance of mercy everywhere.

Some of the most common human experiences are self-criticism, self-doubt, and self-recrimination. We often are far harsher on ourselves than on others, and many of us suffer constantly for it. Research shows that when we truly accept ourselves, it changes everything. We become less reactive and more resilient. Our physical health improves. We are capable of deeper and more satisfying relationships. In The Self-Acceptance Summit: Volume Three, you’ll find a collection of insights, encouraging voices, and on-the-spot tools to help you transform your relationship with yourself.

Writing, like life, can be a difficult process, you just have to take it Word by Word. Provocative and witty, Lamott takes you beyond her book Bird by Bird and into her "writer's mind".

Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at 19, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson, Jax's, life. In careful and often hilarious detail, Lamott and Sam - about whom she first wrote so movingly in Operating Instructions - struggle to balance their changing roles with the demands of college and work, as they both forge new relationships with Jax's mother, who has her own ideas about how to raise a child.

Writer (and sometime house cleaner) Jennifer is 23 when her beloved father, Wallace, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This catastrophic discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by Wallace's illness as by the emotional wake it sweeps under Jen and her brothers, self-contained Ben and feckless, lovable Randy. With characteristic affection and accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever closer.

Jessie's Cafe is a staging place for a group of amusing, entertaining, sometimes raucous but always very real people. Each character is wildly unique yet their human yearnings and shortcomings unite them in a common, and uncommonly strong, bond. This unlikely family includes Jessie, the gorgeous, 79 year-old who owns the waterfront dive. Louise is the cook. Willie is Jessie's gay grandson. And Joe Jones is the deeply devoted and continually unfaithful lover whom Louise tries hard to live without.