The Mass Appeal of Anne Lamott

SOBER ROLE MODEL –

April 6, 2024 -I t will spoil nothing to tell you that Lamott closes “Somehow” with a quote from her favorite William Blake poem: “And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love.” Like the book’s title, its conclusion is apt. Anne speaks to the human in all of us, challenging us to bear her beam of love, and our own.

The title of Anne Lamott’s 20th book is also an apt descriptor of the author’s extraordinary four-decade career. “Somehow,” after publishing four quiet, quirky Northern California novels between 1980 and 1989, Lamott sidestepped the fate of many authors with modest sales: beloved by few, unknown to most, destined to fade into literary oblivion. Instead, Lamott changed her genre, and her life. In 1989, single, poor and pregnant, she had a baby on her own, sustained by the kinds of boho characters who populated her novels. In 1993, she wrote a memoir about it. “Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year” plucked quirky, iconoclastic Lamott out of the margins and morphed her into a best-selling author — a status cemented by her next book, the instant classic “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.”