Showing results by author "Anne Lamott" in All Categories

Bird by Bird is the bible of writing guides - a wry, honest, down-to-earth book that has never stopped selling since it was first published in the United States in the 1990s. Best-selling novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott distils what she's learned over years of trial and error. Beautifully written, wise and immensely helpful, this is the book for all serious writers and writers-to-be.

In Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, the author of the bestsellers Traveling Mercies and Plan B delivers a poignant, funny, and bittersweet primer of faith, as we come to discover what it means to be fully alive.

Writer (and sometime house cleaner) Jennifer is 23 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 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 accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever closer.

Mattie Ryder is marvelously neurotic, well-intentioned, funny, religious, sarcastic, tender, angry, and broke. Her life at the moment is a wreck: Her marriage has failed, her mother is failing, her house is rotting, her waist is expanding, her children are misbehaving, and she has a crush on a married man. Then she finds a small rubber blue shoe - nothing more than a gumball trinket - left behind by her father. For Mattie, it becomes a talisman.

Jessie's Cafe is a staging place for a group of amusing, entertaining, sometimes raucous but always very real people. Each character is wildly unique yet their human yearnings and shortcomings unite them in a common, and uncommonly strong, bond. This unlikely family includes Jessie, the gorgeous, 79 year-old who owns the waterfront dive. Louise is the cook. Willie is Jessie's gay grandson. And Joe Jones is the deeply devoted and continually unfaithful lover whom Louise tries hard to live without.

Some of the most common human experiences are self-criticism, self-doubt, and self-recrimination. We often are far harsher on ourselves than on others, and many of us suffer constantly for it. Research shows that when we truly accept ourselves, it changes everything. We become less reactive and more resilient. Our physical health improves. We are capable of deeper and more satisfying relationships. In The Self-Acceptance Summit: Volume Three, you’ll find a collection of insights, encouraging voices, and on-the-spot tools to help you transform your relationship with yourself.

All Janine Urbaniak Reid ever wanted was for everyone she loved to be okay so she might relax and maybe be happy. Her life strategy was simple: do everything right. This included trying to be the perfect mother to her three kids so they would never experience the kind of pain she pretended not to feel growing up. What she didn’t expect was the chaos of an out-of-control life that begins when her young son’s hand begins to shake.

Join Wes "Scoop" Nisker, a renowned Buddhist meditation teacher, performer, and newscaster, on a wild ride from West to East and back in his quest for true self and enlightenment. Narrated by the legendary Peter Coyote, this audiobook combines the best elements of memoir and social commentary to illuminate the spiritual hunger of modern America.

It is these three prayers - asking for assistance, appreciating the good we witness, and feeling awe at the world - that get us through the day and show us the way forward. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott recounts how she came to these insights, explains what they have meant to her over the years and how they've helped, and explores how others have embraced these ideas. Insightful and honest as only Anne Lamott can be, Help, Thanks, Wow is an audiobook that new Lamott listers will love and longtime Lamott fans will treasure.

Anne Lamott explores the tough questions that many of us grapple with. How can we recapture the confidence we once had as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak? As bad newspiles up - from climate crises to daily assaults on civility - how can we cope? Where, she asks, 'do we start to our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself back...with our sore feet, hearing loss, stiff fingers, poor digestion, stunned minds, broken hearts?' We begin, Lamott says, by accepting our flaws and embracing our humanity.

What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one another and to what's sustaining, when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable? These questions lie at the heart of Stitches, Anne Lamott's follow-up to her New York Times best-selling work, Help, Thanks, Wow. In this audiobook, she explores how we find meaning and peace in these loud and frantic times, where we start again after personal and public devastation, how we recapture wholeness after loss and how we locate our true identities in this frazzled age.

In Grace (Eventually), Anne Lamott examines the ways we're caught in life's most daunting predicaments: love, mothering, work, politics and maybe toughest of all, evolving from who we are to who we were meant to be. This is a complicated process for most of us, and Lamott turns her wit and honesty inward to describe her own intimate, bumpy and unconventional road to grace and faith.

Despair and uncertainty surround us - in the news, in our families and in ourselves. But even when life is at its bleakest, Anne Lamott shows how we can rediscover the hope and wisdom that are buried within us, and that can make life sweeter than we ever imagined. Divided into short chapters that explore life's essential truths, Almost Everything pinpoints these moments of insight and, with warmth and humour, offers a path forward.

The New York Times best seller from the author of Almost Everything and Bird by Bird, a powerful exploration of mercy and how we can embrace it. 'Mercy is radical kindness,' Anne Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It's the permission you give others - and yourself - to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgement and pain that make life so difficult.

Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It's an approach that has become her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us--our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives.

As Anne Lamott knows, the world is a dangerous place. Terrorism and war have become the new normal. Environmental devastation looms even closer. And there are personal demands on her faith as well – getting older; her mother's Alzheimer's; her son's adolescence and the passing of friends and time. Fortunately for those of us who are anxious about the state of the world, whose parents are also aging and dying, whose children are growing harder to recognise as they become teenagers, Plan B offers hope that we're not alone in the midst of despair.