Anne Lamott is one of my favourite writers, she paints insights so vividly with her words. Gorgeous, gorgeous book.

I have read a couple of Anne Lamott books in the past, and Bird on Bird is one of my most favourite books on writing. I'm always recommending it to other writers. However, I found this particular book a little disappointing. There were odd moments when something spoke to me, but these were rare, and I found myself rushing to get to the end. Some of the stories felt long-winded in my humble opinion.

This might prove inspiring for another reader, of course, just not for me this time around.

Lamott’s best all-new essays (if you don’t count Small Victories, which reprinted some greatest hits) in nearly a decade. The book is a fitting follow-up to Almost Everything in that it tackles the same central theme: how to have hope in God and in other people even when all the news (here, Trump, Covid, and climate breakdown) heralds the worst.

One major thing that has changed in Lamott’s life since her last book is getting married for the first time, in her mid-sixties, to a Buddhist. (“How’s married life?” people can’t seem to resist asking her.) In thinking of marriage she writes about love and friendship, constancy and forgiveness, none of which comes easy. Her neurotic nature flares up every now and again, but Neal helps to talk her down. Fragments of her early family life come back as she considers all that her parents were up against and concludes that they did their best (“How paltry and blocked our family love was, how narrow the bandwidth of my parents’ spiritual lives.”)

Opportunities for maintaining quiet faith in spite of circumstances arise all the time for her, whether it’s a storytelling evening that seems like it will never end or a four-day power cut or the kitten going missing or young people taking to the streets to protest about the climate crisis they’re inheriting. A short postscript entitled Covid College gives thanks for “the blessings of COVID: we became more reflective, more contemplative.”

The prose and the anecdotes feel fresher here than in several of her other recent books. I highlighted quote after quote. Some of these essays will be well worth rereading and deserve to become classics in the Lamott canon, especially “Soul Lather,” “Snail Hymn,” “Light Breezes,” and “One Winged Love.”