Lamott, Anne

Emotional Autobiography

Lamott was born on April 10, 1954. She grew up in Tiburon, a suburb in northern California, at a time when the emerging counterculture challenged the perceived conservatism of American society and offered alternative values such as experimentation with sex and drugs. Kenneth Lamott, Anne's father, was a writer who prematurely died of a brain tumor, while her mother Dorothy eventually divorced her husband and founded the first women's law firm in Honolulu. Although she grew up in a deeply atheistic environment, Lamott hung on to her religious faith. Her education was irregular as she dropped out of school in her sophomore year to devote herself to what she felt compelled to: writing.

Lamott's first novel, Hard Laughter (1980), chronicles her father's struggle against his brain tumor, a theme that she also developed in her essay “Dad.” In a New York Times interview, Lamott described the novel as “a present to someone I loved who was going to die.” Rosie (1983) and A Crooked Little Heart (1997) both focus on the character of Rosie, who develops from a coming-of-age child in the former to a tennis champion in the latter. All New People (1989) was written after Lamott quit drinking, and resonates with memories from her own childhood and from the liberal background she grew up in, although Lamott describes it “only autobiographical emotionally.”

Lamott's Success

Yet it was with the publication of her first nonfiction work, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, that Lamott became a best-selling author. The book is an ironic and, at times, brutal account of the struggles that Lamott went through as a single mother without much money. As Lamott recalls, it was through speaking directly to God that she decided to keep her baby, and the operating instructions of the title refer precisely to the directions that she waited for from God. Lamott candidly admits how completely inadequate she felt as a mother and how she not only loved but also hated her son: “I was just hating Sam there for a while. I'm so … tired, so burnt beyond recognition that I didn't know how I was going to get through to the morning.

The baby was really colicky, kvetching, farting, weeping, and I couldn't get him back to sleep. Then the kitty starts in, choking like mad and barfing for a while and continuing to make retching sounds for a while longer, but curiously enough it all seemed to soothe Sam, who fell back to sleep.” Lamott has further explored motherhood and her relationship with her own mother in the essay “Mom” in the collection Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999). Here too Lamott depicts the mother-daughter relationship without sentimentalism, and describes her own mother as “needy, dependent, and angry.” For the first time in her writing, Lamott found the courage to talk about her own mother, a topic that she had always avoided or “sugarcoated.” Although the essay hurt her mother's feelings, Lamott has said she would write it again, as it made things more honest between them. While apparently written in a conversational style, Lamott's requires her nonfiction to go through several drafts before she is fully satisfied with her pieces.

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