What do You think about Operating Instructions: A Journal Of My Son's First Year (2005)?
Hold your hats, folks. I’m about to get all “over-the-top” in this review.I needed this book right now, with all it’s one-lines that make me laugh out loud. You should have seen me last evening, lying in the grass outside my church (it was only in the 70s yesterday, and today, with a light breeze - perfect grass lying weather) and laughing like a maniac. I’m sure all the Amish people who came by in their buggies must have thought I was nuts.So this book is the journal that Lamott kept during her son’s first year of life. It’s a story of love and fear - all that stuff that comes with a kid, I assume - and is so honest, so so honest. And funny, really funny.Take this, for example: November 22 - I wish he could take longer naps in the afternoon. He falls asleep and I feel I could die of love when I watch him, and I think to myself that he is what angels look like. Then I doze off, too, and it’s like heaven, but sometimes only twenty minutes later he wakes up and begins to make his gritchy rodent noises, scanning the room wildly. I look blearily over at him in the bassinet, and think, with great hostility, Oh, God, he’s raising his loathsome reptilian head again. When I go over to the bassinet to pick him up, though, he looks up at me like I’m Coco the clown - he beams, and makes raspberries, and does frantic bicycle kicks like he’s doing his baby aerobics. Then I feel I can go on. I’ve never been so up and down in my life, so erratic and wild. My body is slow getting back to normal, except for my butt and thighs. I have to keep remembering the line about the little earth suits and that I am a feminist, because the thighs are just not doing all that well. I lay in the bathtub yesterday looking at them, thinking of entering the annual Hemingway write-alike contest with a piece called, “Thighs like White Elephants.” And then part of me thinks, Hey, who fucking cares.That voice, that sarcastic, bitter but ultimately beautiful voice is what I love about Anne Lamott. I’m going to give this book to every friend of mine who has a kid - which is most of them - so that they don’t feel so alone when they think their baby has a reptilian head. And I’m going to remember this book when I hold their babies and wonder what goes on in those little brains.The only sad part about having finished this book is that now I’m out of Lamott books to read. Annie, get writing would ya?
—Andi
I've read most every book of Anne's now and without question I can say this one is my favorite. I started reading it at such an appropriate time, given that I myself was a first-time mom at home with a 5-week-old child. (and am typing this review one-handed with said child sleeping in my other arm).Which is why I fell in love with so many of Anne's hilarious recollections of being in the trenches of new motherhood. On her son's colic at the one month mark: "The exhaustion, the sleep deprivation, make me feel like I'm in the bamboo cage under cold water in The Deer Hunter. I don't mean to be dramatic, but this must be what it feels like to be a crack baby. It's a little like PMS on mild psychedelics."I laughed so much at her words and, based on what she shares of the joyful milestones of her son's first year, am buoyed by all the similar rewards to come in my own son's new life. This should be required reading for all new moms -- especially once that third week -- and the reality of how much your life has changed with this new person in it -- comes along.Loved this line in particular: “One thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.”
—Gail
I thought this book was alright. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but a new or about-to-be-new parent. I certainly don't think it's the best book Anne Lamott has ever written. I liked Bird by Bird and a couple of her novels a lot better than this.It's written as if it really were Lamott's journal, and maybe that's true. But I didn't like the structure because it jumped around between different subjects and moods too much. I only gave it two stars mostly because I was uncomfortable about the way in which Lamott wrote about race. It's like she goes out of her way to point out how many people in her life aren't white when it's not critical to the narrative. It feels like she is pointing this out to prove that she's really open-minded or something. Then she describes a lot of the people who attend her African-American church as "really black" or "so black" or "very black" which is just terribly racist. It's never totally made clear, but the degree of blackness of her church friends does not seem to be in reference to their skin color (which would be problematic in a different way); rather, it seems to be the main way she describes their mannerisms or speech patterns. What am I, the reader, supposed to do with that information? Fill in the blanks with stereotypes? Ugh, not helpful! I think it's fine that she tells us who is black and who is not, but she could have come up with a lot more adjectives to describe her church friends' personalities than "really black." Her son Sam was born in 1989, but I don't think that the copyright date on this book is old enough to excuse the weird treatment of race.
—Deborah
