I had never heard of this author before and I'm not sure how I learned of this book. I listened to the audio version of it read by the author. She is a gifted and enjoyable storyteller. Her stories are both funny and thought provoking. She wrote her feelings about little experiences in her li...
I approached this book with high expectations, which is always a mistake. I love most of Lamott's non-fiction work and had read a positive review or two of Rosie. The first half was hard going and I had to talk myself out of giving up on it more than once. Slow moving and too much detail. It pick...
Anne Lamott is the epitome of the vitriolic, hateful liberal. The catch is that she actually seems to realize it. Throughout Operating Instructions, one finds scatterings of an understanding that there’s something not quite consistent about preaching love, mercy, and non-judgmentalism while simul...
With the same winning combination of humor and honesty that marked her recent nonfiction bestsellers, Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott presents an exuberant novel about a family for whom the joys and sorrows of everyday life are magnified under the glare of the unexpected.Rosi...
This was fantastic, and I wrote a million notes. For example:I love the description of throwing rats in a jar and watching them scratch. This was a tool for the mind to silence distractors in your life that block you from writing. Also having an acre of land with a fence, and if people come in ...
With the trademark wisdom, humor, and honesty that made Anne Lamott's book on faith, Traveling Mercies, a runaway bestseller, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith is a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in increasingly fraught times. The world is a more dangerous place than it was when Lamot...
It means he won’t have to deal with hat hair as he goes through life. This morning as we were racing around, I was trying to get us both fed and ready for church, and I had total hat hair. When you have extremely curly hair, it is always getting mashed down into weird patterns, like grass that’s ...
There was Sam at thirteen—usually mellow, funny, slightly nuts. But when the plates of the earth shifted, there was the Visitor, the Other. I called him Phil. Phil was tense. Also sullen and contemptuous. There was me at forty-eight—usually mellow, funny, and slightly nuts—and there was the Menop...
They named him Jax Jesse Lamott, Jesse after Amy’s beloved grandmother Jessie, and Jax because they liked the way it sounded. Amy was twenty when she delivered, and Sam was nineteen. They’re both a little young, but who asked me? Sam’s birth, on August 29, 1989, was by far the most important day ...
They used a rubber, the first time, and then they ate hash brownies he had made, and were so amazingly stoned that she couldn’t deal with the whole condom thing, only his skin in her, soft, hard, furry, smooth, slow-motion eternity. After that she thought about him every minute, every hour all da...
You need to put yourself at their center, you and what you believe to be true or right. The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing.These concepts probably feel like givens, like things no one ever had to make up, that have been true...