Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, by Anne Lamott (1993)
I would be interested in reading a survey of how many new mothers have near-manic-depressive feelings like the ones this author describes. She alternates hating the baby, wanting to throw him down the stairs, calling him "scum," etc.---with loving the baby so much she swoons, calling him breathtakingly beautiful, and being unable to imagine anything more wonderful ever happening to her. I got uncomfortable reading this book because the emotions were so raw and I could picture the child reading the book later in life and getting his feelings hurt. I still remember vividly the one time my kind and loving mother called me a slob, so I'm not sure I could have incorporated scum and hate and so forth.
In fact, speaking of mixed feelings, this emotional account leaves me unsure of my review. On one hand, I'm all for putting down exactly what you actually think/feel, especially in a non-fiction book and especially if I'm not required to read it. On the other hand, I stop being for it when it starts doing some serious potential injury to other people. I know a lot of people complain that they had no idea how angry they could get at their own children, and that they wish the books would have warned them---but perhaps the books are by mothers who didn't want to make their children feel awful. I also stop being for pure honesty when I sense that someone is actually BRAGGING about how depressed they are in a one-upmanship kind of way ("I'm way more screwed up than you so you have nothing to complain about."), or using terms like "so incredibly depressed" to describe a momentary bad mood.
Do all these mixed feelings mean I don't recommend the book? No; in fact, I thought it was great. I squirmed, it's true---but Anne Lamott mixes her suicide attempts with so much intelligent humor that I also laughed and marveled. I enjoyed getting her perspective on single motherhood and thought she was remarkably objective about it: that is, she realized that having a husband would solve some of her problems but also create new ones. I wished for a photo section like biographies have: I wanted to see more pictures of her and of her baby and of her friends. Sometimes she just nailed a thought or feeling or personality so precisely I wanted to write it down and send it to everyone I know.
Hard Laughter, by Anne Lamott (1980)
Anne Lamott is one of the most autobiographical fiction writers I've ever read---or perhaps she's deliberately teasing me by putting in just enough real stuff to make me wonder about everything else. I just finished reading her non-fiction book Operating Instructions (see review, above), so there are certain things she'd told me about her life that make certain fictional sections sound suspiciously familiar. It can even be a little painful: if you know the tragedies she's going to face by the time she publishes Operating Instructions thirteen years later, it's difficult to read Hard Laughter knowing you know something she doesn't know.
In Hard Laughter, a woman in her early 20s deals with her father's discovery that he has a brain tumor. Around this basic plot revolve subplots: the woman's relationships with her brothers, her relationship with her best friend, her relationships with men, her relationship with a 10-year-old friend who is impossibly wise and articulate. The story is set in her town, which is filled with impossibly interesting/peculiar/diverse people. One gets the feeling that no one who lives there was a business major who now works as a bank manager. Oh, no; everyone is, for example, someone who went to art school before dropping out to move to Siberia to do drugs for eight years and join a liberation army, then moved back to town to open a shop selling camels and inkwells, and now wears nothing but tweed kimonos and eats nothing but brown rice and strong beer.
It was difficult for me to identify with the main character since she spends so much time doing drugs and being depressed, but on the other hand by the time I finished the book I wanted to get Operating Instructions out of the library again to see if I could verify which fictional characters were the same as the non-fictional people I'd met there. I liked the book, and I think I like Anne Lamott. I'd certainly snatch up any new novel she wrote.
Can we leave the subject now, though, so that I can mention a pet peeve of mine? Someone went through this entire book and circled every word she/he didn't know and every concept she/he found interesting. The best way to read a book is to forget you're reading, and each pen mark yanked me back into the mode where I notice the font of the text. I don't like that. If that's you marking up library books, knock it off.
Rosie, by Anne Lamott (1983)
When I find a new author I like, sometimes it's hard to read anything else until I've exhausted all the books by that author my library has. This is my third book by Anne Lamott, and I'd say it includes all of the fascination and distress of the first two. Perhaps this one affected me a little more---it seemed a little more descriptive than the others, and a little more proud of itself for discussing painful subjects in great detail. After you get to feeling maternal about a little girl in the book, she's sexually molested by her best friend's father. I found this almost impossible to read. Other difficult sections for me were the ones in which pet animals died: it happens several times, and once it's a particularly upsetting kind of death. The theme of the book is a woman's struggle to overcome alcoholism for the sake of her daughter. The book was so realistic I found myself upset again and again. What terrible, tortured lives some people lead. There's a description of an LSD trip that makes me positive I will never be tempted to use drugs stronger than Tums. Still, this book was another successful combination of frank writing and good laughs.