Traveling Mercies

January 4, 1999
A key moment in the step-by-step spiritual awakening of the author came to her as a freshman in college when an impassioned professor taught her Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Raised by her bohemian California family to believe only in "books and music and nature," Lamott (Bird by Bird; Operating Instructions) was enthralled by the Danish philosopher's rendition of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham, Lamott learned, so trusted in God's love that he was willing to follow the order to sacrifice his own son. This story pierced Lamott and she "crossed over. I don't know how else to put it or how and why I actively made, if not exactly a leap of faith, a lurch of faith.... I left class believing--accepting--that there was a God." Nonetheless, it would take the heartbreak of her father's death and more than a dozen years of escalating drug and alcohol addiction to bring Lamott to fully embrace Christianity. In a short autobiography and 24 vignettes that appeared in earlier versions in the online magazine Salon, Lamott blends raw emotional honesty with self-mocking goofiness to show how the faith she has cultivated at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in the poor community of Marin City, Calif., translates into her everyday life and friendships, especially into her relationship with her young son, Sam. Although Lamott's clever style sometimes feels too calculated, the best bits here memorably convey the peace that can descend when a sensitive, modern woman accepts the love of God with her own brand of fear and trembling. First serial to Mirabella; author tour. Agent, Chuck Verrill.

January 1, 1999
This book, Lamott's eighth (following Crooked Little Heart, LJ 4/1/97), is part spiritual autobiography, part essay on living as a recovering alcoholic, drug abuser, and bulimic and a loving but deeply anxious single mother. Lamott tells of finding Christian faith and learning to allow it to help her through tough times. Working hard at self-examination, she makes no excuses for herself. At times wickedly funny, her prose is as lovely as always. She notes that to Christians "death is really just a major change of addresses," but when her son is sick, the glibness vanishes, and she must work hard to allow herself patience and peace. Her musings on cellulite, curly hair, sick children, and fear of dogs are entertaining. She's the mouthy best friend we cherish at our kitchen table. Recommended for public libraries.--Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll., Bronxville, NY

January 1, 1999
Lamott's books are so alluring they seem to emit a gravitational force. A tender and perceptive novelist, Lamott is more than generous with the circumstantial and emotional facts of her private life in her nonfiction, writing here about profound crises and amazing salvations. The daughter of nonreligious California parents, Lamott longed for a context for her innate spirituality, especially after experiencing a "lurch of faith" in college, but instead sought escape from psychic pain in alcohol and drugs for many lonely years until she happened on a music-filled church in Oakland and found her spiritual family. Squeezing every last drop of meaning out of even the smallest things, Lamott writes agilely about such watershed events as the deaths of her father and closest woman friend, and the birth of her son and life as a single mother, all the while tracing her slow crawl back to faith with wonder, gratitude, and an irrepressible love of a good story. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)

January 4, 1999
Lamott (Bird by Bird) reads a collection of her autobiographical essays, each a heart-wrenching detailing of a life grown up in a world of obsessions: food, alcohol, drugs and relationships. She tells of her childhood and early adulthood in Tiburon, Calif., where she started drinking and drugging young in a permissive 1960s-era disheveled household. The title essay, "Traveling Mercies," dwells on things "broken," such as her body, when she became a bulimic. Lamott's writing is honest and direct, and in her reading she presents her words with emotional insistence. She recalls episodes from her life with vivid ferocity, noticing how "everything felt so intense and coiled and M bius strip-like." As she has a son, sobers up, her search for awareness turns spiritual. The sum effect comes across like a hipper version of Melody Beattie's self-help classic, Codependent No More. Simultaneous release with the Pantheon hardcover.

October 1, 1998
A best-selling author explains how she came to believe in God.