Rating: ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

Comments: Another great book with some very interesting insights. I like how Lamott pushes through her loneliness rather than recoiling from it. And even though it seems like a straightforward book about her son’s first year, it’s so much more. There’s spirituality, there’s the battle of knowing you’re losing someone you love, there’s the wonderment of the first child, and then there’s daily life. Through it all, she has grace, and she has humor.

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From the Book:

Once I asked my priest friend, Bill Rankin, if he really believed in miracles, and he said that all I needed to do was to remember what my life used to be like and what it’s like now. He said he thought I ought to change my name to Exhibit A.

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I think he believed that our job, the job of a writer, is not to get up and say, “Tomorrow, in battle, most of you will die…” Instead a writer must entertain the troops the night before. I think he believed that the best way to entertain the troops is to tell stories, and the ones that they seem to like the best are ones about themselves. You can tell sweet lies or bitter truths, and both seem to help, but it’s like Czeslaw Milosz said when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

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Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.

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I keep remembering a letter Simone Weil wrote to her mother in France, when the mother was panic-stricken because Simone was doing all this radical social-activist work with the poor, even though she (Simone) was very frail, very sick. Simone said to her mother something like, “I love you, and if I had two lives, I would give you one. But I don’t.”

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And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.

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People who write novels
Often live in hovels.

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I can still get that sense that we are a complete family unit, but sometimes I’m so hungry for a partner, a lover. One thing I know for sure, though, is that when you are hungry, it is an act of wisdom each time you turn down a spoonful if you know that the food is poisoned.

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