Anne Lamott

I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy—a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled. We children were little Marcel Marceaus, tiptoeing about in our invisible boxes. No one ever yelled in a bad marriage that lasted 27 years. My parents went cold and remote. They spoke in clipped phrases of erudite contempt for each other.

People used to come to our house and drink, so our home became a kind of Advent calendar, where you’d open a door and there’d be people passed out or the wrong people kissing each other. If we said anything to my parents, they’d say, “Oh, honey, for Christ’s sake, we’d all just been drinking”—as if it were an acceptable explanation, like “Oh, honey, we’d all just been putting thorns in our noses.”

I grew up thinking that what I witnessed was probably not true, and not all that big a deal— people had just been drinking, for Pete’s sake. If it made me feel worried, well—such was the nature of the overly sensitive child.

- Anne Lamott

Essay