The mass appeal of Anne Lamott
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. She changed her genre, and her life.
In 1989, single, poor and pregnant, she had a baby on her own. 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 bestselling author — a status cemented by her next book, the instant classic Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and whose sales now number in the millions.
Lamott has since published three more novels and 10 more bestselling non-fiction book.
Her 2017 TED Talk has been viewed more than 2.8 million times, possibly because somehow Lamott unfurls a capacious umbrella over groups of people so disparate, they'd rather stand in the rain than stand together: White Christians, Black Christians, hipsters, dog moms, baby moms, feminists, addicts, left-wing activists, the very poor, the very rich. Somehow, in her TED Talks and public appearances and all she's written in the past 25 years, Lamott, has made each one a hit.
As she relates in Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott has somehow (on a senior dating site) found her Neal, and, three days after receiving her first Social Security check, became a firsttime bride. In her trademark godly yet snarky way, she extracts every life lesson from her latest new experience with the deft zeal of a chef reducing flour and fat to roux. Lamott writes not only of love's glories but also of its quotidian impossibilities, keeping the reader gripping the passenger seat as she navigates love's hairpin turns. What Christian, what addict, what Marin County socialite will not relate to the “basic format” of Lamott's fights with her husband, which she relays in the third person as if narrating a play?
“Every so often Annie does not get her way, or Neal says something superior and provocative ... Annie shuts down and becomes as quiet as the grave, while waiting for Neal to realize the gravity of his mistake ... Annie and Neal sit together grimly on the couch, ignoring each other while Annie thinks about how all men are pigs.”
No matter a Lamott book's title, no matter the theme of the yarns that burst from its pages like clowns from a circus car, its message is the same irresistible combo of love, hope, faith and laughter.
It will spoil nothing to tell you Lamott closes Somehow with a quote from her favourite William Blake poem: “And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love.”
Lamott speaks to the human in all of us, challenging us to bear her beam of love, and our own.