For years Anne Lamott’s book, Bird By Bird, collected dust on my shelf. Many an aspiring (or badly blocked) writer raved to me about it as the Holy Grail of books about writing. “Forget Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones,” they would say. “Anne Lamott is the shit. She’s real. She drinks too much. She’s always short on money. She’s pure.” Still, I resisted, enjoying the raised eyebrows and shocked expressions when I shrugged and said something of the blah, blah, blah cateogry.
For reasons that feel both fuzzy and synchronistic, over the weekend I broke my seal and read the book. Cover to cover, loads of hearty laughter, sick with jealousy. Now I understand what the fuss was all about, agree that in the book she’s real, drunk, broke but also exquisitely honest and human. A definitive inner hottie, too, pure and simple.
Go figure that one of my favorite chapters plumbed the topic of jealousy. I am now experiencing jealousy of that acutest kind, like a pile of burning tires, because this beautiful creation I’m slobbering over, that I might contemplate doing all sorts of evil to have as mine is not mine, will never be mine. It will always be the progeny of someone else. And it’s so unfair.
Because there was no intersection between me and this book until now, there are a few bitter pills to choke on. I’m late entering the game of finding kindred spirits with whom to gush and swap favorite passages, I missed out on Lamott’s Salon.com era, and I have a whole bunch of her other books to catch up on. Just desserts. At least this book has been added to the pile bound for France.
If you don’t have Bird by Bird, get it. This instant. I insist.
Note: This post came out of a project called Thirty Voices, for which nearly thirty women in their thirties living in various parts of the world wrote about various themes over the course of a year. I don’t remember the theme that triggered this piece. I forgot to keep notes. Darn.
Yesterday evening another of the neighborhood’s big pines crashed. Not a lick of wind. Not a drip of rain. No reason for it to fall. But it did, across the road, just missing a house.
That’s the third tree to pitch itself this year. Late summer, the back half of a house up our street was taken out by a red oak, out of the blue on a sunny, calm afternoon.
There’s never a warning with these trees, no suspect creaking or shifty groaning. One minute they stand. Boom. Next minute…boom. And these aren’t young, stripling trees, either. They’re mature, thick-trunked, with 75, 100, 125 years to their credit. They fall, these red oaks and pines, because they’re root systems are shallow and eventually they just give out and give up, yielding to the forces inching them slowly and surely to their inevitable crash.
In this neighborhood the “act of God” most likely to kill you, or at least impose some damage, is a red oak or a pine that’s reached its tipping point. Not fire or flood, not earthquake or monsoon, not tornado or ice, but a tree falling at some random, unpredictable, unstoppable moment.
Today I whittled down which books I want to bring with me to France, a task far dicier than shaving the shoe collection. There are a few that I know can be downloaded from ebook.com, so that helps. As far as I can tell, there will be two small boxes of books that have been read but not having them with me would be like losing a limb. And there will be two small boxes of books yet to be read. It will be a long time before I read French well enough to hit up the local library for reading material, and books are not cheap over there, so I might as well ship over the “To Read” stacks.
I’ve had a number of people tell me that their stories of preparation for such a move are quite different. Their stories are about having to let go of almost everything, paring their belongings down to two, maybe a few, suitcases. If I absolutely had to, I could let go of my books. But I don’t have to, and although I’m on board with leaving behind me many, many things that are nice to have but not essential when seen through the filter of the bigger picture, these books define a threshold.
January 16th, 2008 at 8:53 pm by 
Would it make you feel any less jealous to know that not everyone liked Bird By Bird? Like, for instance, me?
I’m just not an Anne LaMotte fan. She’s all about herself, if you know what I mean. But many people adore her!
Nope, no less jealous, and it does trigger that ferocious defensiveness that rabid fans tend to have. (As in what’s so wrong with a writer’s book about her writing life being about her?) But, opposing arguments are healthy, as you well know. Rabid fans need someone to poke an air hole into their bubble now and again.
I heart her. Traveling Mercies is great. And I like knowing that her stomping grounds (Marin County) were mine for a bit, too.
True, her book should be “about” her. But it was SO self-absorbed. At least that is how it struck me! Is it my age? Possibly…….
Age schmage. It just wasn’t your bag (or book). Writing Down The Bones didn’t click for me on the first read, the second read, or the third read. Then I said to hell with it and passed it along to somebody who would love it, because obviously I was never going to.