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Jennifer is twenty three when her beloved father, Wallace, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This catastrophic discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by the course of Wallace's illness as by the emotional wake it sweeps under Jen and her brothers, self contained Ben and Feckless, lovable Randy. With characteristic affection and dead on accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever closer in the intimacy Jen prizes among the other estimable things: good music, good hard laughter, good sex, good industry, and good books."… (more)
Perhaps I was more of an impressionable young woman when I first read and loved this book. Somehow this story helped me dealing with some of this sort of stuff, somehow I enjoy it a little more than I do all the religion stuff she acquired a little later. This was a wonderful introduction for the later books, which I am still glad I read although I've sort of missed it all since "Blue Shoe." I'm sorry. It's just that there's so many other books and I don't really want to read about soberness and religion, I want to read about sex and drugs and rock and roll.
This is where Anne Lamott started. I have her first edition, even with an erratum slip wedged in it. It was purchased at Vroman's bookstore in Pasadena, California.
You know Anne Lamott's work today? This is everything she was before she got clean and sober and found Jesus. Still Anne, just drunk and high. Her voice was as clear then as it is today. ( )
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of the life and of love and wings:and the gay great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
--e. e. cummings
Problem stated at its most succinct - is life too short to be taking shit or is life too short to mind it?
--Violet Weingarten Intimations of Mortality
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my father, Ken
and to Steve, John, and Nikki Lamott; to the family and to the cronies.
First words
My family lived for fifteen years in a castle built more than a century ago by an eccentric man who wanted his Rhine-born wife to feel at home when he brought her to live in California.
Jennifer is twenty three when her beloved father, Wallace, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This catastrophic discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by the course of Wallace's illness as by the emotional wake it sweeps under Jen and her brothers, self contained Ben and Feckless, lovable Randy. With characteristic affection and dead on accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever closer in the intimacy Jen prizes among the other estimable things: good music, good hard laughter, good sex, good industry, and good books."
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