Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION LAM | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION LAM | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
With generosity, humor, and pathos, Anne Lamott takes on the barrage of dislocating changes that shook the Sixties. Leading us through the wake of these changes is Nanny Goodman, a girl living in Marin County, California. A half-adult child among often childish adults, Nanny grows up with two spectacularly odd parents- a writer father and a mother who is a constant source of material. As she moves into her adolescence, so, it seems, does America. While grappling with her own coming-of-age, Nanny witnesses an entire culture's descent into drugs, the mass exodus of fathers from her town, and rapid real-estate and technological development that foreshadow a drastically different future. In All New People , Anne Lamott works a special magic, transforming failure into forgiveness and illuminating the power of love to redeem us.
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 (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Confirming the talent evinced in Rosie (and somewhat obscured by the excessively arch tone of her last novel, Joe Jones ), Lamott here achieves her promising potential in a novel of rare sensitivity and evocative power. The rueful, elegiac tone of her prose balanced by humor and plangent insights, she tells a quiet but resonant story through the eyes of Nan Goodman, who has returned to the small northern California town of her childhood. This is a meticulously observed memoir of growing up as the child of ultra - liberal (former ``commie'') parents: her volatile father is a noted but not financially successful writer; her mother, a devout Christian who rails at God and seeks to reform the world through social activism. The extended family includes Nan's brother Casey, their feckless, alcoholic uncle Ed and obese aunt Peg, and Nan's mother's eccentric divorced friend, Natalie. There is little overt action here--Natalie gets pregnant by Ed, Casey smokes pot, their father leaves and comes back--but these events are magnified against the social and cultural currents of the '60s and '70s: developers change the character of the town, there is an epidemic of divorces, the drug culture takes its toll. The rural setting is integral to Nan's memories: the smell and sight of the sea, wildflowers on the brown hillsides, plum and apple and fig trees, pink and purple fog. Nan remembers it all with a clear-eyed nostalgia, acknowledging the migraines that made her an outsider, and the fear, shame and humiliation lurking even in the fondest memories of happy times. The emotional complexity of this understated tale makes it an absorbing read. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Here, as in Rosie (1983), the strongest of her three earlier novels, Lamott's central character is a smart, sassy, and affecting young girl who sorts through life's mysteries by observing the adults around her. After her marriage crumbles, Nanny Goodman returns to the small town in northern California where she gew up, and, almost immediately, she's swept back to the time of her childhood in the early 60's--when life seemed both safer and more precarious. Nanny's father, Robbie, was a writer and teacher who never made enough money. Her mother, Marie, was a political leftist and self-styled Christian, given to wandering around the house in her underwear and telling God exactly what was on her mind. Casey, Nanny's older brother, was an enthusiastic and inept young ballplayer, later caught up in a dope-smoking adolescence. Nanny recalls her family's life in wonderful, evocative still-life scenes. ""Tiny waves sloshed the shore and it smelled like salt and rain and seaweed"" on the momentous day when her aunt Peg abandoned her husband and left home. Weeks later, swallows ""dipped and darted through the air, blue-black on top, camel and cinnamon colors beneath"" as Peg drove back into town. What Nanny captures most poignantly of all, though, is that peculiar flood of feeling--embarrassment, pride, despair, love--that swirls around every family and, sometimes, draws them under. This is the mystery that Lamott ponders: why some families sink and others stay afloat. There's no easy answer, but this novel, both deep and buoyant, holds a few good clues. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this child's-eye view of the fear and pain of growing up, Lamott shows in vivid word pictures that the child is parent of the adult. Nan Goodman, hurting after a failed marriage and her father's death, goes back to the town of her childhood. As skinny little Nanny, aged five to 12, she either adored or was ashamed of her leftist parents, her writer father who never made enough money for comfort and her devoutly Christian mother who was his inspiration. Wrenching memories of family disasters, and especially the cruel snubs and abject solitude of childhood, are dissipated by love and laughter, and the adult Nan makes peace with her past. In spare prose Lamott ( Rosie , LJ 10/15/83) creates endearing, quirky characters in scenes memorable for being so skillfully drawn and universally appealing. A heart-warmer, to be savored.-- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
