Books |
Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace
Anne Lamott
By
Published: Jun 07, 2022
Category:
Spirituality
Bird by Bird is the book to read if you’re a beginning writer, or a baffled amateur, or just want to witness a fine stylist making the keyboard sing.
I don’t have a reason for avoiding Anne Lamott’s next 14 books that makes me sound smart. Though I do have reasons. Over the years, Lamott found Jesus and became that annoying person who doesn’t quite try to convert you but wouldn’t object if you came to Him. Someone has described her as “the patron saint of brokenness,” and she became a kind of Leonard Cohen figure, Our Lady of the Unlikely Redemption — on her Amazon page, a reader testifies that she “is the reason I have HOPE and FAITH tattooed on my arms.” Okay, so we are not responsible for the excesses of our fans. But what about twisting her hair into dreadlocks? What about describing herself as “wild, ruined, aging, gorgeous, nutty, marvelous me?”
But I got “Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace” and read every word, marking and underlining wildly. I did this because this is a hard time. We are surrounded by stupid, and the rich seem to think they live in another country entirely, and there are few visible signs that the good guys have a shot of winning. And so we ask ourselves: What can we do that matters? And how, in this sea of shit, can we keep ourselves clean?
“Small victories” seem like the only victories we’re likely to experience. Which, if you think about it even briefly, isn’t awful. Small victories are local. We can see them. Touch them. Learn what happens next.
Here is the first sentence of the book: “The worst possible thing you can do when you’re down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends.”
Death. It’s everywhere in these pages. Kids. In-laws. Parents. It’s what happens in all our lives, but compressed in Lamott’s. And different in her life. For many of us, death forces us to ask unpleasant questions and get unsatisfying answers. For Anne Lamott, death is how God mystifies us, opens us up, gives us a fresh path to grace.
No wonder so many love her — Lamott looks right into the dragon’s mouth. And, at the same time, she takes the measure of her own ridiculousness. And it works. It all works! [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle version, click here.]
At a primary level, she’s selling bravery:
Trappings and charm wear off… Let people see you. They see your upper arms are beautiful, soft and clean and warm, and then they will see this about their own, some of the time. It’s called having friends, choosing each other, getting found, being fished out of the rubble. It blows you away, how this wonderful event ever happened — me in your life, you in mine.
And — this is the punch line — she’s selling community:
Two parts fit together. This hadn’t occurred all that often, but now that it does, it’s the wildest experience. It could almost make a believer out of you. Of course, life will randomly go to hell every so often, too. Cold winds arrive and prick you: the rain falls down your neck: darkness comes. But now there are two of you: Holy Moly.
Anne Lamott annoys me. I look at her picture and her beaded dreadlocks and I think: You are a fool. And as I read her, I’m talking back to her all the time, and there’s a tinge of snark and sneering — and admiration, and jealousy — in my responses. But the thing, all of that is enjoyable. I like disagreeing with Anne Lamott. In these pages, she makes me think and smile and cry, and while there’s little danger I’ll ever be washed in the blood of the lamb, I am grateful for the conversation I have with her.
24 stories of love and loss, acceptance and joy — it’s a lot. Is this shtick, or is it soul food? Is this, in the vernacular of the day, a thing? I’m still processing her point of view. Read it. You tell me.
