272 pages
Read this book, it’s hilarious. Anne Lamott seems to fumble at everything. She is a mess. She fumbles at being a new mother, fumbles providing a living for her new son, and fumbles with her spirituality. Finally, like every good writer, she fumbles at that too. Lamott makes every mistake you can think of and laughs at herself along the way. The best part is that she chronicles this first year of her son’s life, so we can enjoy it with her. Bless her for that.
Two of my favorite quotes:
“I know it is odd to a lot of people that I am religious—I mean, it’s odd to me that I’m religious, I never meant to be. I don’t quite know how it happened: I think that at some point, a long time ago, I made a decision to believe, and then every step of the way, even through the worst of it, the two years my dad was sick with brain cancer, the last few years of my drinking, I could feel the presence of something I could turn to, something that would keep me company, give me courage, be there with me, like the seeing man in this movie. The movie so exactly captured how I feel these days, that Jesus is there with us everyplace Sam and I go.”
“I had a few great hours of heavy but epiduralized labor. Then it became hard at the end, and everything went wrong. I couldn’t push the baby out, and Pammy and Steve stood by my feet in the labor room for an hour, exhorting, encouraging me to push, telling me how beautifully I was doing. I was in despair. I made a tiny little poo on the table, which they didn’t mention at the time but which they now manage to work into about two-thirds of all our conversations.”