Oak Hill Public Library

Somehow

by Anne Lamott

Publishers Weekly Lamott (Dusk, Night, Dawn) brings her signature wit and warmth to these effervescent meditations on matters of the heart. Drawing from across her life, Lamott details how seemingly lost love can be transmuted into different forms, recalling how friends and family stepped in after she was broken up with while pregnant in her 30s: “Love pushed back its sleeves and took over.... We were provided with everything we needed and then some”—even if that love “was a little hard to take.” Elsewhere, Lamott explores the gap between the way one wants to give love and how another wants to receive it, illustrating the point with a humorous account of how she tried to foist a swag bag from her church onto a skeptical unhoused person. Turning to love that inflicts pain, Lamott delineates in wrenching detail how her parents’ stony marriage affected her childhood—“It was uncertain whether they cared for each other, so I took it upon myself to try to fill the holes this left them with.” A topic that might feel trite in the hands of a lesser writer takes on fresh meaning in Lamott’s, thanks to her ability to distill complex truths with a deceptive lightness. This rings true. (Apr.)

Kirkus The bestselling author follows the template of the most recent half-dozen of her loosely connected essay collections, this time focused on love. “What are we even talking about when we talk about love? What is it?” So asks Lamott on the first page of her latest book, and she goes on to answer the question in a similar manner to her many previous books: Love is Jesus, but also each other, and also, sometimes, chocolate. In these varying anecdotes, the author plumbs familiar ground, including family and her church community, the adorable malaprop-prone kids in her Sunday school class, and her unhoused neighbors near her Bay Area home. Newer topics include her still-recent marriage (her first, in her mid-60s) to the “lovely, steady” Neal and the upheaval caused by her son Sam’s drug addiction and her grandson’s arrival. With age, Lamott’s essays have become less acerbic and more attuned to the natural world; the scent of eucalyptus comes up often, as do the flowers and foliage, the fog and the forests of Northern California. In this book, she focuses less on vengeful thinking for comic effect and more on the joys of smelling the roses. In one essay, she recounts how she taught a reluctant young Cuban woman to swim; in another, she describes how she held a sharpened pencil to her son’s neck and told him not to come home until he was clean. (A month later, he did.) As always, a strong vein of spirituality runs throughout, with Lamott’s characteristic descriptions of an all-loving God who is often flummoxed and saddened by humanity, but hopeful anyway. This all comes across as much less twee than it might be, and the stories make up in warmth what they lack in novelty. Lamott newbies will find this a kind view of loving oneself and others despite our collective imperfections. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list ldquo;Even in the darkest and most devastating times, love is nearby if you know what to look for,” writes Lamott (Dusk Night Dawn, 2019). Lamott senses love in myriad ways, including sharing necessities with people who are unhoused, forgiving others, and finding yourself within your family. Lamott mulls over love as she digs through boxes of memories in the attic or walks the streets of Cuba with her husband. She finds love in the community, in solitude, in dreams, in her Sunday school students and her AA meetings. Her innate honesty allows her to share her vulnerabilities and laugh at her own sometimes over-the-top attempts to find and share love. Her journey to sobriety and that of her son are told painfully but candidly and with gratitude. Lamott freely admits her faults and isn’t afraid to call out others for their actions. But it is all done with such clarity, feeling, and goodness that readers will find themselves laughing out loud and fighting back tears. Ultimately, this is a testimony to love and hope in an often painful world. Lamott’s many readers are loyal, and this will be an easy sell. But pass it on, too, to people who may not even realize that they are searching for ways to connect with and love others.

From Booklist, Copyright � American Library Association. Used with permission.

Library Journal Lamott returns with another hymnal of perambulating parables, this time ruminating on love. Her anecdotes are often repetitive from book to book—readers of her other nonfiction may experience d�j� vu—but perhaps that is the point: love and faith are iterative, a cumulation of life experiences constantly refined by the passing years. Through all of these books and years, Lamott's theme remains: "I felt very exposed and a little unhinged, and it was good." Readers become Lamott fans because of her thematic constancy in balancing the sacred and the profane. This title follows the same pattern. Revisiting a transgression that bubbled back to the surface, her past multifaceted mea culpa, and what to do about it now, Lamott writes about how the past is just under the surface, waiting to be stirred up, held to the light, and reexamined; she is a master in doing exactly that. VERDICT Recommended. Readers already familiar with Lamott's nonfiction work will find comfort in her familiar touchstone topics of faith, family, and recovery viewed through the lens of love and aging. Readers new to Lamott might want to start with her earlier works such as Help Thanks Wow or Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.—Rita Baladad

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