OK, it’s not a very original or really humorous title. But anyway, here we go. I had originally decided to do three “Christmas books.” The first one which I was going to make no 3 seemed inappropriate, so I changed my mind. Two would do– then I noticed Anne Lamott’s “Almost Everything–Notes on Hope.” I noticed it only because, well, I recognized her name AND I was pointed in the right, as it turned out, direction by the impenetrable(well, to me at least) workings of the Dewey Decimal system which dictated that Krista Tippet’s book and Anne’s were within a few feet of each other in the stacks. So the book almost chose itself. I’m glad it did.(By the way, have you ever wondered how many people have been brought together by the Dewey Decimal system? Two people with similar interests wind up in the same lane of the library and they reach for the same book or different ones and their shoulders touch and they apologize. Later that day they’re sharing drinks and dinner at a local restaurant and eventually they have kids one of whom turned out to be–well, you take it from there–my imagination sometimes gets lost)

Anne has been writing for quite a few years now. I first became aware of her on a program that in the 2000’s was on NPR Sat mornings. I have forgotten the name of the guy who did it, but I think it was Michael something. He worked out of Milwaukee and I remember thinking of him as the Upper Midwest comedian who isn’t Garrison Keillor. Anyway he had Anne on once and I was impressed with both of them in their interview. He handled her very kindly and as my wife pointed out she sounded very vulnerable at the time, not exactly the persona she usually has projected since, though there are often hints of it. (This was also the show which introduced me–and I’ll bet many others–to Kurt Elling, the dominant male voice in American jazz singing of the past couple of decades. Thanks, Michael, whoever you are)

Joyce(my wife)has read a lot of Anne’s stuff and I had read a little bit, though not for a long time. I did remember, that she was–uh, different. Actually, she is considerably different from–well, just about any writer you can think of. If Mitch Albom is spirituality based on love and service, and Krista Tippett is that plus wondering and exploring, then Anne is spirituality on steroids braced by a bit of OCD, and by doubt, faith, imagination, memory, dread and hope–maybe not in that order All these go into making up this remarkable woman and irresistible writer whose acquaintance I am so glad to have made again.

Anne holds nothing back. She jumps into the issue or question or whatever the way I think she jumped into life–and still does. She has had a troubled life in many ways, the child of a brilliant, charming and dysfunctional family, dogged by addiction, depression, disillusion, loss and betrayal. But she has also been published, made good friends, received adulation, raised a son and, at 62, married for the first time. She knows what it is to lose and to win and she knows what it is to sit with the depressed and dying and lonely. She also has a(more or less literally)irrepressible humor and irreverence which comes out at many different times. And she knows that whatever our differences and lackings, we all need love, we all need to be affirmed in some way. …

Here she is on the difficulties of growing up–“Most emotional wounds are caused by a child’s belief that he is deficient, defective, or annoying …The message . . . was that we didn’t have intrinsic value but that we could earn it…Putting together a reasonably good personality was how we staked a claim on the outside world although it meant ignoring our inside world…
“This was life inside the hardware store–the bakery on the other hand , was the family’s understanding that a kid doesn’t have to do or achieve or own anything more for the world to care and even delight in her …How did the rest of us ever find the bread of life, the ginger cookies of hope? The answer is little by little, over the years, mosaic chip by mosaic chip.”

And this is one of Anne’s main points. There is some joy and satisfaction out there, particularly if you’re lucky and you know how to look for it. But the rest ranges from drab to hideous and you need to be careful and not expect all the answers all the time. They just won’t be there. and just about nothing is guaranteed., particularly re: human relationships.

She explains in detail her battle with hate. Most religious writers will simply tell you it’s bad to hate and let you take it from there–but sometimes that can be hard to do–sometimes it’s impossible. Anne tells us how she tried to understand hate. She imagined she had hate over for tea and tried to understand it. She then handed it its hat and reflected. Maybe hate was(or haters were)within the realm of humanity. “If we work hard and are lucky, we may come to see everyone as precious, struggling souls. … God is better at this than I am.” She is aware of her shortcomings and how hard it is to live up to her highest values.

“My focus on hate made me notice I’m too much like certain politicians. The main politician I’m thinking of and I are always right. I too can be a blowhard, a hoarder, needing constant approval and acknowledgement, needing to feel powerful.”

So she comes to see that getting rid of the hate is sometimes hard work. But she knows that work has to be done so as to avoid reaching the end someday “toxic and self-righteous;” better to be living as far as possible with Wendell Berry’s words, “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”

Towards the end of the book Anne delves a bit more deeply into grief and loss, though one of the lovable things about her writing is that pain is never far away and humor is always hiding somewhere, ready to pop out and surprise you. As always, she finds irony and self-mockingly criticizes herself. Remembering a dying friend she says, “Jesus says that we need to approach God and life like children, not like bossy, white alcoholic women with agendas.” So she did. She does.

“Like the rest of us, I am a mixed grill of beauty and self-centeredness, pettiness and magnanimity, judgement and humility.” Well, aren’t we all? And isn’t it our business to try to expand the good parts and reduce the not-so-good ones, but always with the knowledge we will never be entirely successful?

Anne’s final chapter in the book(she calls it her “coda”) is entitled Hope. Throughout the book she makes the point that there is good out there and contradiction and nuance and that these often balance–or don’t–in weird, scary and unacceptable seeming ways. Fears sometimes are true and so are dreams. So is love. But one never knows.

“Hope springs from what is right in front of us, what surprises us and seems to work.

“Of course, we are reduced sometimes, late at night, no matter how deep our faith in God or Goodness or one another, to quavering aspic.” And questions always remain, such as why her home was spared when so many others in her part of California were destroyed by one of their fires? Our minds, she states, “are hard-wired in many ways to do many things only half of which from my observations are self-destructive.”

She ends with a quotation I was not familiar with from John Lennon(Of all people, my subconscious irritatingly interrupts me–I never liked Lennon a lot, but he nailed it here–I hope)”Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” It is hard not to compare that to Julian of Norwich–“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” She preceded Lennon by something like a millennium so it’s taking awhile–but the thought is still there.

I do have a couple of ending notes–fairly early on Anne makes a passing reference to one of my favorite writers and one who has deeply influenced my own thinking, Madeline L’Engle(author of a huge number of books, novels and non-fiction, YA and adult, science fiction, social commentary and religion-best know and likely her best, “A Wrinkle In Time”). I don’t think the two ladies ever met. They were separated by miles of geography and years of time(about 36 of them), but it is interesting to speculate on what it would have been like if these two brilliant, warm and supremely talented, deep-thinking writers had ever had lunch together, say at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Ave just across from the Cathedral of St John the Divine, where we once watched a cat wait until a couple left, then jump up on a chair and finish what they didn’t. And nobody bothered the cat, a restraint which Joyce and I both loved(L’Engle was chief librarian there in her later years–the Cathedral, I mean–I don’t think the pastry shop had one) Or at a bunch of other places on the Upper West Side. Or wherever.

Anyway, imagine a meeting between the two of them. Imagine the words that might flow between them, the loving and warm but also disciplined and correct, grammatically perfect and I’ll bet always impeccably dressed Episcopalian, L’Engle, and the off-the-wall, in-your-face, let-it-all hang-out, God knows what denomination she is,(Presbyterian?) Lamott. It would have been a fortunate fly on the wall who would have gotten to hear such a conversation.

Well, anyway, try one of her books. Start with this one, if you like. You should at least draw from it some laughs, some serous thoughts and some awe at the quirky, contradictory and altogether inexplicably brilliant mind behind it all. Beyond that, if you’re lucky and you think about it carefully and deeply, she might do more even more than that–like maybe give you the courage to live.