Biography & Autobiography |
New Age |
Religion & Spirituality |
Nonfiction |
Summary
Summary
From the New York Times bestselling author of Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Almost Everything, a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in increasingly fraught times.
As Anne Lamott knows, the world is a dangerous place. Terrorism and war have become the new normal. Environmental devastation looms even closer. And there are personal demands on her faith as well: getting older; her mother's Alzheimer's; her son's adolescence; and the passing of friends and time.
Fortunately for those of us who are anxious about the state of the world, whose parents are also aging and dying, whose children are growing harder to recognize as they become teenagers, Plan B offers hope that we're not alone in the midst of despair. It shares with us Lamott's ability to comfort and to make us laugh despite the grim realities.
Anne Lamott is one of our most beloved writers, and Plan B is a book more necessary now than ever. It is further evidence that, as The New Yorker has written , "Anne Lamott is a cause for celebration."
Author Notes
Anne Lamott was born on April 10, 1954 in San Francisco, California. She began writing when she returned to California after spending two years at Goucher College, but her early efforts, mostly short stories, met with little success. The turning point in her writing came with a family crisis, when her father was diagnosed with brain cancer. She wrote a series of short pieces about the traumatic effect that serious illness has on a family. These pieces were published, and they eventually became the basis of her first novel, Hard Laughter, published in 1980.
During the 1980s, she wrote three additional novels, Rosie, Joe Jones and All New People. In 1989, her life took another turn when her son was born. Her next book, published in 1993, was a non-fiction effort called Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year. She wrote ironically, but candidly, about her struggles to adjust to her new role as a mother and a single parent, and her experiences with everything from sleep deprivation to financial and emotional uncertainty to concerns about what she would tell her son when he was old enough to ask about his absent father.
Operating Instructions proved to be even more successful than her novels, and led to interviews on network news programs and a regular spot on National Public Radio. Her other works include Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Crooked Little Heart; Blue Shoe, Imperfect Birds, and Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son. Her title Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. Her title Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair and Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace also made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Five years after her bestselling Traveling Mercies, Lamott sends us 24 fresh dispatches from the frontier of her life and her Christian faith. To hear her tell it, neither the state of the country nor the state of her nerves has improved, to say the least. "On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life is hopeless, and I would eat myself to death. These are dessert days." Thankfully, her gift for conveying the workings of grace to left-wing, high-strung, beleaguered people like herself is still intact, as is her ability to convey the essence of Christian faith, which she finds not in dogma but in our ability to open our hearts in the midst of our confusion and hopelessness. Most of these pieces were published in other versions on Salon.com, and they cover subjects as disparate as the Bush administration; the death of Lamott's dog, her mother and a friend; life with a teenager and with her 50-year-old thighs-yet each shows how our hearts and lives can go "from parched to overflow in the blink of an eye." What is the secret? Lamott makes us laugh at the impossibility of it all; then she assures us that the most profound act we can accomplish on Earth is coming out of the isolation of our minds and giving to one another. Faith is not about how we feel, she shows; it is about how we live. "Don't worry! Don't be so anxious. In dark times, give off light. Care for the least of God's people!" Naturally, some pieces are stronger than others-her wonderful style can come across as a bit mannered, the wrapup a bit forced. But this is quibbling about a book that is better than brilliant. This is that rare kind of book that is like a having a smart, dear, crazy (in the best sense) friend walk next to us in sunlight and in the dark night of the soul. Author tour. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Funny, acerbic reflections on faith and family during George W. Bush's first administration. Readers have long awaited Lamott's second book on spirituality (after Traveling Mercies, 1999), and it won't disappoint--or not too much. As before, Lamott charts her life as a deeply religious Christian and committed leftist, though she's no stereotypically pious Presbyterian. For example, she has dreadlocks and an out-of-wedlock son, her beloved Sam. She wears a red bracelet that was blessed by the Dalai Lama, and she hates Republicans, most especially George W. Bush. In the essays here, many from Salon, Lamott portrays herself as a mother heroically trying to figure out how to parent a smart--and occasionally smart-alecky--teenager. She also describes her attempts to love her aging, sagging body. And she takes readers inside her wonderfully warm church, still under the leadership of the awesome Veronica. Throughout, we read about her struggle to forgive her dead mother, and, because Lamott's trademark humor and irreverence mark practically every page, readers will howl with laughter at Lamott's inability to do anything with Mom's ashes other than leave them in her closet. But there's also the real work Lamott is doing here, the hard, slow work of forgiveness, and things can get teary. Still, the book doesn't quite live up to its predecessor. One example will suffice: Somehow Sam, whom readers first met in utero in Operating Instructions (1993), then as an enchanting grammar-schooler in Traveling, doesn't make quite as charming a character this time around. Lamott's approach to parenting an adolescent is not without wisdom, but reading about the Lamotts' battles over homework is neither entertaining nor illuminating. Traveling Mercies set a very high standard, and to say that Plan B almost gets there is still to say that it's a wonderful read Lamott's legions of fans will no doubt lap up. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Lamott, a novelist and columnist for Salon,0 has continued to write the sort of pithy spiritual essays that made her first collection, Traveling Mercies 0 (1999), a best-seller. She proves to be just as funny and candid in her second collection, and just as skilled in transforming the chaos of life into lessons in forgiveness, compassion, and faith. After surviving her wilderness years and finding salvation in a progressive Oakland church, Lamott developed a fluently humanistic approach to prayer and right action, discoveries that shape her compelling reflections on everything from age to the solace of long walks to the traumas and reconciliations that take place in her hormonally charged household as her son, Sam, enters adolescence and she confronts menopause. A skilled storyteller with an antic sense of humor and a refreshing lack of piety, Lamott also writes about how "depressed and furious" she is over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. As she participates in peace demonstrations, teaches Sunday school, and tries hard to feel love even for those she deplores, Lamott avers that life is all about "Plan B,"\b \b0 that is, remaining flexible and tolerant and open to holiness wherever it beckons. A Presbyterian in dreadlocks who wears a red cotton cord blessed by the Dalai Lama and a Virgin Mary medallion, Lamott brings invaluable humor, imagination, and magnanimity to the conversation about faith. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Lamott's facing a lot: she's turning 50 as her mother struggles with Alzheimer's and her son acts like the teenager he is. And then there's international terrorism. So what's Plan B? Hope. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.