Anne Lamott is one of those authors I keep meaning to read. Many people I know are great fans, but I have just not picked anything up before now. About midway through the book I glanced at some of the reviews on Goodreads and there were many that were not all that favorable. It seems that many fans thought this book went over many of the same topics in fairly similar ways to her previous books. It is not that they hated the book or thought the writing was bad, it was just a well worn path.
Well I don’t have that problem since I have managed to not reading anything by her before. I picked this up after seeing it in one of the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” lists on Amazon. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up then if it hadn’t been so cheap. The kindle version is only $3.84. (All of the rest of her kindle books are $9.99 or above. And the hardback is only $9.15, while the paperback is $11.20. I don’t understand book pricing.)
With the above disclaimers, I liked it. There were some difficult essays, one on assisted suicide I thought was particularly disturbing. Not that she discussed assisted suicide, but she was that blatant about the discussion. Others are on abortion, politics (or how she feels about politics), raising her son as a single parent, making amends and a lot of other topics. She is not a standard conservative Christian evangelical author. She talks about her addiction, her very sorted past, lots of bad decisions she has made, and continues to make. This is about working through life, attempting to follow God, and not always making it as you would like to. I think she writes from a similar place as Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years). Both trying to write as people that are Christian but don’t have it all together. The only differences are a couple of places when I just wanted to shake her and wondered why she wasn’t getting it. I didn’t really have that reaction to Miller.
I do feel like I am a bit behind. There are a couple places where I think I would have understood more if I had read previous books. But those feelings of strangeness are not that regular.
Have you read Anne Lamott before? Read this one? A fan?
I enjoy reading Anne Lamott's earlier works more: Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies and Operating Instructions, more than I did Grace Eventually. In this latest work, it was very repetitive of her earlier books and not as well done. She also came across a little disjointed for me in this one.