Author of the week

Anne Lamott never guessed she’d be cashing Social Security checks before reciting wedding vows for the first time, said Manoush Zomorodi in NPR .org. Though the best-selling author of Bird by Bird and many other wise memoiristic books says she had hoped to find a soulmate to marry decades earlier, she’s relieved she didn’t jump too soon. “I was almost married a couple times, and I just thank God and all the saints that I didn’t marry those two men,” she says. It was only after she created a dating-site profile in her early 60s that she met Neal, a hospice volunteer who is now her husband. “We just got each other,” she says. “I knew that we could talk, keep the conversation going for the rest of our lives.” The couple was watching a U.S. Open tennis match on TV one day when he had her mute the sound and spontaneously proposed. She agreed—on the condition they could, despite his allergies, get a cat.

That’s just one kind of love story that Lamott tells in her latest book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love, said D. Watkins in Salon. She also writes about love for parents, siblings, friends, even work— and how to nourish the feeling. “The book is based on the premise that if you want to have loving feelings,” she says, “you do loving things.” For Lamott, who just turned 70, it’s a special volume, a repository in which she has deposited all she has learned about life so that her son, grandson, and others in their generations can tap into those hard-earned lessons when she’s gone. For Anne Lamott, then, what’s it all about? “Community, love, activism, nature; deep, deep, deep, friendship; self-love, divine love,” she says. “Each piece is one of those realms.”