She should know she’s obviously been through a lot of it. Friendship, she claims, is the best salve for anyone’s pain, anyhow. In the face of these tragedies, Lamott is refreshingly silent about questions of theodicy, choosing instead just to be there for people in need. “I outweigh him by nearly seventy-five pounds.” Lamott also takes refuge in a wide assortment of friends, many of whom have to deal with life-threatening illnesses as the narrative moves along. “I make him because I can,” she explains. Lamott remains an active participant, demanding that her son, Sam, attend church with her most weeks. When she was on the verge of becoming a single mom in the late 1980s, the church truly came through for her, with members slipping ten- and twenty-dollar bills into her pockets after Sunday services. Lamott circuitously chronicles finding the church (for months, she stayed only for the music, leaving before the sermon) just as she approached a crossroads in her life, finally admitting her alcoholism and other addictions, and starting out on the long road to sobriety (these chapters are among the book’s most chilling, along with her struggles to overcome body-loathing and bulimia). It is a small, interracial community which lovingly incorporates pariah elements. This memoir, though, is more spiritual than religious: Like many in her boomer generation, Lamott doesn’t hold much truck with churches but has found a meaningful congregation all the same. Novelist Lamott’s third autobiographical book (Operating Instructions, 1993 Bird by Bird, 1994) follows her usual pattern of cutting wit and wretched frankness. Brutally honest, sometimes funny vignettes about affirming faith and community in the midst of drug-induced angst.
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