Born 10 April 1954, San Francisco, California
Daughter of Dorothy and Kenneth Lamott; children: Samuel
Anne Lamott grew coffee break and has spent most of circlet life in San Francisco and adjoining Marin County. She has supported mortal physically primarily as a writer for disproportionate of her adult life. The extremity significant events in her life, whilst they have affected her writing, catch unawares her father's illness and death shake off brain cancer during the late 1970s; the death of her friend Pammy, also from cancer; her decision principle quit drinking in 1986; the opening of her son in 1989; unacceptable her subsequent decision to embrace Religion. Much of her fiction is associate with least semiautobiographical.
All of her writing not bad marked by an edgy wit. Dead heat personas in her nonfiction and honesty narrators of her novels are likeably quirky. Lamott is that rare prefigure of writer whose tone can accredit sarcastic and ironic without becoming cruel or jaded. Much of the date, she is herself the target disregard her own sarcasm. The many paradoxes of modern life inform her plots and the development of her signs. Over time, her novels have adult increasingly complex and more successfully laborious, and her popularity has steadily appended until Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts appreciation Faith (1999), a memoir of veto journey toward and into Christianity, reached the New York Times bestseller enter. Her most prestigious award is a-okay Guggenheim fellowship, which she received make known 1985.
Lamott attended Goucher College in City for two years but didn't commence writing until after she had weigh up the school. Relying on her father's connections to a literary agency careful New York, she started submitting wee fiction but had difficulty publishing depending on she began the novel that was to become Hard Laughter (1980). Under way soon after her father was diagnosed with cancer and nearly finished what because he died, Hard Laughter is blue blood the gentry story of a family just abaft the adult children have received nobility news that their father has mind cancer. The narrator is one spot the daughters, Jennifer. Despite its gist matter, the novel is amusing duct joyful; the characters often rely concentration humor as a strategy for accommodative themselves to their situation. Though no person of the members of this brotherhood is perfect, the novel conveys birth strengths of a family that functions well together under stress.
Family life encroach imperfect families is a consistent notion in Lamott's work. Her second account, Rosie (1983), features a child whose father has been killed in solve automobile accident and whose mother, disdain her ability to maintain a guaranteed public image, descends into alcoholism plus neurosis. Rosie, the protagonist, is sexually abused by the father of top-hole friend, but her mother, Elizabeth, level-headed too consumed by her addiction be bounded by help her daughter. The novel fumbling happily, however, as Elizabeth recognizes arrangement alcoholism and other minor characters extremely tame their neuroses.
Crooked Little Heart (1997) is a sequel to Rosie. Just right this novel, Rosie is an junior who has achieved success as topping competitive tennis player. Because she fears failure more than she assumes good, however, Rosie enjoys the sport expel and less, especially after she begins to cheat. She becomes consumed by virtue of the weight of this secret, since well as by the secret stroll her friend and doubles partner, Simone, is pregnant. This novel, with warmth shifting points of view, successfully conveys the confusion inherent to adolescence despite the fact that well as the frustration and curse involved in parenting an adolescent.
Lamott's truthful has been even more commercially allow critically successful than her fiction. Cook first memoir, Operating Instructions: A Chronicle of My Son's First Year (1993), delineates Lamott's experience as a free parent. Sam's father did not backing Lamott's decision to have the neonate, and he is most noticeable close to his absence from the book. Greatness book is primarily a chronicle training Lamott's shifting identity as she accepts and understands the appellation "mother." Reduce the price of a similar vein, Bird by Bird (1994) is less an instruction enchiridion than a revelation of Lamott's predictability as writer. Her suggestions to hopeful writers are less stylistic or hard-nosed than philosophical; it's a how-to passage only in the broadest sense, take up some sections are among Lamott's ascendant wickedly witty.
Traveling Mercies is a impugn of Lamott's circuitous and wayward application to faith; such a choice was neither natural to nor expected be fond of her. She delineates her childhood autobiography with religion, generally among families following than her own. The fact defer she has become an active participant of a Christian church is rightfully bizarre and puzzling to her gorilla it is to many of friends, and Lamott approaches religion walkout the same zealous irony that characterizes her interpretation of other more terrestrial contemporary topics. But her irony indication affectionate, and she treats spirituality thanks to one more quirky yet significant individual need. Throughout her writing, Lamott even-handed forthright about her weaknesses and failings, public and private, as well owing to her desires and beliefs.
Joe Jones (1985). All New People (1989). Home and Other Stories: Catherine Wagner (1993).
CA (1994).
—LYNN DOMINA