Adventure classics -- For unto us a son is given (oops!)

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year

by Anne Lamott

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“I woke up with a start at 4:00 one morning and realized that I was very, very pregnant,” Anne Lamott writes in the opening of her 1993 memoir, Operating Instructions. “What tipped me off was that, lying on my side and needing to turn over, I found myself unable to move. My first thought was that I had had a stroke.”

Being Lamott, who writes with sometimes hilarious, sometimes agonizing frankness about her struggles with writing itself, with addiction, love, death, Republicans, God¾ especially God¾ we understand this will not be a Dr. Spock-style manual on childrearing.

Or will it? She’s full of first-hand advice on what it feels like to trim your baby’s fingernails too close, whether to circumcise, the pros and cons of natural childbirth and breastfeeding. And things I worried about with my child, (and maybe that other parents worry about as well). Are they eating enough? When will they sleep through the night? How can I deal with their pain and sickness? And most of all: How are we going to do this, with all that this implies?

In Lamott's story, in 1989, a few years after becoming sober, and after previous abortions, she became pregnant again. This time, she wanted to keep the baby. Her lover, however, “was dramatically less excited than I was to find out I was pregnant,” she writes, “so much so that I have not seen or heard from him in months.”

She dreaded facing another abortion, she writes, even while fearing over and over “that I am much too self-centered, cynical, eccentric, and edge to raise a baby, especially alone ¼ At thirty-five years old, I may be too old and too tired to be having my first child. And I really did think for several seconds that I might have had a stroke; it is not second nature for me to believe that everything is more or less okay.”

Struggling with her decision, she wrote her fears on paper and “said to God ¼ I am willing to have the baby if that is your will, if that is the right thing for us, and I am willing to have an abortion, if that would be best for the baby and me; so I am putting this in your in-box, and I’m just going to wait for my next operating instructions.”

And so it goes, through the journey of self-discovery that comes from bringing up another human being, the son she would name Sam. Her emotions range from the ecstasy of her first sight on her newborn¾ “he was like moonlight” to ruminations about his “reptilian head” as he wakes her yet again, exhausted from too little sleep and realizing, like many new parents, that she can’t remember when she last had enough free time even to bathe or brush her teeth.

As Lamott fans know, still ahead at the end of Operating Instructions ends is Sam’s own journey of self-discovery, including his present life as the unmarried father of a son born before he was out of his teens.

But in 1989, that was still in the unforeseeable future.

“There are times when he experiences bad things, pain or fear or hurt feeling, and he clings to me like a wet cat,” Lamott writes at the end of her book. “I don’t know what to make of it all. But, as I was writing this just now, Sam went into the living room closet, played a little song on the guitar, and then, just then, just this second, peered around from behind the closet door, babbling absolutely incoherently, grinning at me like some crazy old Indian holy man.”

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics completes a December of spirited adventures with Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “Roshomon.”)

Wordcraft -- Readers’ favorite posts: the first runner-up

With major changes coming to this blog next year, I’m using these last December weeks of Wordcraft to count down readers’ all-time favorite posts. Today’s entry is the first runner-up among most highly-viewed pages in all categories. It’s actually the most highly viewed of Wordcraft posts, and one of my earliest, from April 13, 2011, titled, “Anne Lamott on writing, families and faith.”

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Anne Lamott arrived at the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Dallas’s Northwest Highway last Friday looking waifish. Still slim at nearly fifty-seven, her graying blonde hair in its signature short dreadlocks, and with skin pale enough to write on¾ which she apparently does if she has ideas without paper at hand¾ she took charge of the crowd, inviting people to sit on the carpeted area near the podium when all the store’s spare chairs filled.

She was there for the paperback release of her latest novel, Imperfect Birds, but pronounced herself reluctant to talk about the book after a weeklong publicity tour.

“Tell us about Sam,” an audience member asked.

“I’d much rather talk about Sam,” Lamott agreed, referring to the son whose infancy she chronicled in her memoir Operating Instructions. Sam, now nearly twenty-one, has a twenty-month old son, Jax, who shares the current dedication page. (The original hardcover version of included a poem by the Sufi poet al-Rumi that explained the title of Imperfect Birds. But most of the crowd seemed to treat it as a reference to Lamott’s cult-status writing handbook, Bird by Bird.)

“Sam is tall and thin and has dark, normal hair.” She paused for knowing laughter from the audience at the comparison to her own hair, so curly she related opting for dreads as the only way to control it. “He’s very funny, full-time art academy. He’s a believer. I gave him a lot of rope to walk his own spiritual path.” For the rest of the discussion, Lamott’s passions for family and spirituality intertwined with her passion to writing.

“I write the same book,” she said in response to a question about what she’s writing. “(I write) that it’s scary here. That for people like me who are shy, it’s not a good match.” But she writes, she said, as part of the conversation she has with life, God and her readers. She doesn’t write, she said, because she enjoys it, but because she counts herself among those “longing to be one of the storytellers of the culture,” who serve as narrators for a collective. “Nothing has ever happened to me that hasn’t happened to you. The great words of all liberators, including Christ (are) ‘me, too.’ Only the details are different.”

After nearly an hour, she tore herself away from the discussion with the audience, which clearly loved her, to read and comment on her book. Imperfect Birds is the third in series about the Ferguson family that began with Rosie and continued with Crooked Little Heart. Lamott called it a trilogy, but I had to wonder whether the Fergusons might turn up
again whenever society has problems their creator feels they can address. They dealt earlier with the death of young Rosie’s father and the effects of the highly competitive environment that Rosie (and Lamott) experienced as adolescents. The present book shows Rosie at seventeen, “beautiful and yet with a lot of secrets,” Lamott said, “and it starts to occur to Elizabeth (her mother) that she’s in over her head.”

It’s no secret to readers now that Rosie’s problem is drug addiction. Lamott has struggled all her life with various addictions, and admitted that there’s some of her in all her characters. In this case, she felt the need to hold a conversation with young people and their parents about the evils of addiction, the reason, as she states at the beginning of her book that “a teenager died nearly every year after a party and kids routinely went from high school to psych wards, halfway houses or jail.”

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When this post first appeared, I thought its popularity might be due to Lamott’s shyness about embracing social media. It’s hard to believe, but three and a half years ago, there were few mentions of her online except a few interviews. Now she’s made the leap to Wikipedia, Twitter (@annelamott) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/AnneLamott/) but readers still drop by here, for which I’m grateful. Sometimes you’re looking for the complete al-Rumi quote that headed the first edition of Imperfect Birds. I have not been able to locate a source, despite searching several English translations. But I’ll leave you another, which I think Lamott would approve. Khaled Hosseini quoted it when he visited Dallas last year: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” The complete verse is available in The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.

(Next Monday, Anne Lamott’s post actually has a close competitor. What is it? You’ll have to check back here to find out.)

Wordcraft on Wednesdays -- Anne Lamott on writing, families, and faith

Anne Lamott arrived at the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Dallas’s Northwest Highway
last Friday looking waifish.  Still slim at nearly fifty-seven, her graying blonde hair in its signature short dreadlocks, and with skin pale enough to write on -- which she apparently does if she has ideas without paper at hand –she took charge of the crowd, inviting people to sit on the carpeted area near the podium when all the store’s spare chairs filled.

She was there for the paperback release of her latest novel, Imperfect Birds, but pronounced herself reluctant to talk about the book after a weeklong publicity tour.

“Tell us about Sam,” an audience member asked.

Anne Lamott

“I’d much rather talk about Sam,” Lamott agreed, referring to the son whose infancy she chronicled in her memoir Operating Instructions.  Sam, now nearly twenty-one, has a twenty-month old son, Jax, who shares the current dedication page.  (The original hardcover version of Imperfect Birds included a poem by the Sufi poet al-Rumi that explained the title, but most of the crowd seemed to treat it as a reference to Lamott’s cult-status writing handbook, Bird by Bird.)

“Sam is tall and thin and has dark, normal hair.”  She paused for knowing laughter from the audience at the comparison to her own hair, so curly she related opting for dreads as the only way to control it.  “He’s very funny, full-time art academy.  He’s a believer.  I gave him a lot of rope to walk his own spiritual path.”  For the rest of the discussion, Lamott’s passions for family and spirituality intertwined with her passion to writing.

“I write the same book,” she said in response to a question about what she’s writing.  “(I write) that it’s scary here.  That for people like me who are shy, it’s not a good match.”  But she writes, she said, as part of the conversation she has with life, God and her readers.  She doesn’t write, she said, because she enjoys it, but because she counts herself among those “longing to be one of the storytellers of the culture,” who serve as narrators for a collective.  “Nothing has ever happened to me that hasn’t happened to you.  The great words of all liberators, including Christ (are) ‘me, too.’  Only the details are different.”

After nearly an hour, she tore herself away from the discussion with the audience, which clearly loved her, to read and comment on her book.  Imperfect Birds is the third in series about the Ferguson family that began with Rosie and continued with Crooked Little Heart.  Lamott called it a trilogy, but I had to wonder whether the Fergusons might turn up again whenever society has problems their creator feels they can address.  They dealt earlier with the death of young Rosie’s father and the effects of the highly competitive environment that Rosie (and Lamott) experienced as adolescents.  The present book shows Rosie at seventeen, “beautiful and yet with a lot of secrets,” Lamott said, “and it starts to occur to Elizabeth (her mother) that she’s in over her head.”

It’s no secret to readers now that Rosie’s problem is drug addiction.  Lamott has struggled all her life with various addictions, and admitted that there’s some of her in all her characters.  In this case, she felt the need to hold a conversation with young people and their parents about the evils of addiction, the reason, as she states at the beginning of her book that “a teenager died nearly every year after a party and kids routinely went from high school to psych wards, halfway houses or jail.”

(Next week -- Character vs. plot -- agent Weronika Janczuk's series on plotting returns)