Imperfect notes on hope

     

Last year I laughed in joyful anticipation the moment I learned that Anne Lamott had written a new book. I hadn’t seen the title, but I loved the New Yorker’s comment that her real genius lies in capturing the ineffable—describing not perfect moments, but imperfect ones … perfectly.

      An observation Lamott could have written herself!  She has the cheek and the verbal dexterity.

      Soon I was laughing again—this time in joyful celebration of her marriage (her first) to a former marketing vice-president turned writer (his third) with interests ranging from Plato to bluegrass music. They met on a match-making website.
      As expected, the new book, her eighteenth, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope (Riverhead Books, 2018), kept me chuckling for all of its 189 pages.

      Lamott darts with the spontaneity of a four-year-old and the self-assurance of a tenured college professor, from topic to topic—whatever teases her mind about the “mess and tenderness of the human condition.” 

      She talks about being doomed, stunned, exhausted, and over-caffeinated.  She loses herself in the beauty of the changing seasons, and cautiously looks at aging—concluding that you will rarely feel as old as you are, except when you have just returned from traveling overseas or are in line at the DMV.

      Lamott readily admits that almost every facet of her meager maturation and spiritual understanding has sprung from hurt, loss, and disaster.
      She chatters on about food and dieting, decluttering, “famblies," mental health, miracles, and puzzles—by which time she’s decided that all truth is paradox. And this turns out to be a reason for hope, which is neatly summarized on the back flap of the book:

      Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.

      And that, surely, covers ALMOST EVERYTHING.