Happy Birthday Anne Lamott

It's the birthday of a writer who said, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." That's Anne Lamott, (books by this author) born in San Francisco (1954). She did well in school, she was a tennis star, went to Goucher College in Maryland on a tennis scholarship. But she drank too much, became an alcoholic and bulimic as well, and dropped out of college after two years. She struggled to get back on her feet, even though she was doing well as a writer — she wrote for magazines and published two novels, Hard Laughter (1980) and Rosie (1983). But her health was getting worse, with even more drugs and drinking. One night, feeling weak and drunk and miserable, she said: "I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner. ... The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there — of course, there wasn't. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this. And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, 'I would rather die.'"

Instead, she started attending a tiny church, and slowly changing her life. She published her third novel, Joe Jones (1985), which got bad reviews — and caused her to drink even more. Every morning, she woke up not knowing what had happened the night before, and she had to call friends to find out. Finally, she was speaking at a benefit for 150 people who had all paid to come hear her talk, and she drank so much during her speech that she passed out in the middle of it. So she decided to get sober, and slowly she did, and has been ever since.

A few years later, she got pregnant and decided to keep the baby, even though its father left when she told him that. She wrote her first nonfiction book about it, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year (1993), and she talked about how hard it was to be a mother, and also about her conversion to Christianity. It got rave reviews, and she kept writing nonfiction books, including Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994) and Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair (2013) as well as novels. Her most recent book is Almost Everything: Notes on Hope (2018).
The Writer's Almanac