Book
Operating instructions : a journal of my son's first year / Anne Lamott.
Record details
- ISBN: 0679420916
- ISBN: 9780679420910
- ISBN: 9781400079094
- ISBN: 1400079098
- Physical Description: x, 251 pages ; 21 cm
- Edition: First Anchor Books edition.
- Publisher: New York : Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2005.
- Copyright: c1993.
Content descriptions
| Summary, etc.: | "I woke up with a start at 4:00 one morning and realized that I was very, very pregnant." So begins novelist Aniie Lamott's journal of the birth of her son, Sam, and their first year together. She must face complicated circumstances of heroic proportions. A single mother who must support herself and her son entirely by her wit and craft, she is also a recovering alcoholic, clean and sober for more than three years. Newly and militantly on her own side, she remains dangerously close to memories of days when she "couldn't take decent care of cats." Fortunately, Lamott is one of the world's funniest people. And she desperately needs her sense of humor as she chronicles her new life with Sam. Plagued by the normal worries of all first-time mothers, she adds her concern that she is "much too self-centered, cynical, and edgy to raise a baby." One false step will turn her sweet, big-eyed boy into an ax murderer. And no matter how well she handles things Sam will still have to get through the seventh grade. Even in exhaustion and despair, she is buoyed up by her deepening religious faith and her somewhat eccentric extended fimily, friends who offer her great love and loyalty and are much-needed replacements for Sam's absent father. But this year of new beginnings suddenly includes the beginning of an end. Lamott's best friend since childhood, her birth coach and a daily companion to her and Sam, is diagnosed as having terminal cancer. As Lamott copes with the vexations of single motherhood, she must also accept this unimaginable loss. Facing both joy and grief greater than any she has ever known, she must find within herself the capacity to continue. Her courageous commentary, narrating days barely balanced between angst and strength, fills this journal of a year when "sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it al.] feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly." With hope and humor, she wrenches from the mundane rock-solid evidence of the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit. Her complex vision, inspired by joy, makes us laugh out loud. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Lamott, Anne > Family. Single mothers. |
Holds
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Library Journal Review
Operating Instructions : A Journal of My Son's First Year
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
This account is much more than a parent's chronicle of her initiation into parenting. Lamott, a 35-year-old novelist (e.g., All the Right People , LJ 8/89), recovering alcoholic, and single parent, here shares her humor, faith, friendships, and irreverence. Her descriptions alternate between joy and despair as she tells of nursing her young son and watching him grow. Lamott also describes what it means to be a single parent, the sobering reality of being alone with financial responsibilities, and the trials of life as an older parent. Intertwined with the parenting account is a parallel story of the serious illness and impending death of the author's best friend. Operating Instructions is enhanced by Lamott's colorful and expressive language, her philosophical reflections, and her descriptions of many eccentric friends. Although this book may not appeal to all readers, those who enjoy diaries and first-person narratives will savor it. For most collections.-- Kay Brodie, Chesapeake Coll., Wye Mills, Md. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Publishers Weekly Review
Operating Instructions : A Journal of My Son's First Year
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Magazine columnist and novelist Lamott ( All New People ) captures both the poignancy and comedy of her first year as a single mother in this wonderfully candid diary. Her quirky humor steadily draws the reader into her unconventional world as she describes her friends and neighbors in northern California, her participation in a local church, her experiences as a recovering alcoholic and--best of all--her infant son, Sam, born in 1989. She covers maternal emotions from rapturous bliss to bare fury (``In the middle of the colic death marches, I end up looking at the baby with those hooded eyes that were in the old ads for The Boston Strangler ''). Throughout, she airs her strong political and religious beliefs. And when her best friend, Pammy, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Lamott conveys her anguish with the same depth of feeling and sense of the absurd that characterize her observations about her son, God, recovery, writing, Republicans, men and life as usual. Even non-parents will enjoy this glowing work. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
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