Bird by Bird by Bird by Bird

"I started writing when I was seven or eight. I was very shy and strange-looking, loved reading above everything else, weighed about forty pounds at the time, and was so tense that I walked around with my shoulders up to my ears, like Richard Nixon.  I saw a home movie once of a birthday party I went to in the first grade, with all these cute little boys and girls playing together like puppies, and all of a sudden I scuttled across the screen like Prufrock’s crab.  I was very clearly the one who was going to grow up to be a serial killer, or keep dozens of cats.  Instead I got funny…."

                                            from Bird By Bird, the Introduction


Anne Lamott is the funniest person on paper I know.  She has the kind of voice that if you should hear it on a radio interview from the next room (which I did once twenty years ago), you'll know it's Anne's voice (as I did when I followed the voice into the kitchen that day to make sure.)  She writes exactly like she talks.

She's not funny all the way through, though, one funny line after the other.  She can have you laughing, then bring you in for a tearful landing in the very next paragraph.  She makes the reader feel like she's right there, your best friend, just telling stories and throwing in some good advice along the way.

Bird By Bird is subtitled "Some Instructions on Writing and Life."

I have many books that instruct me on the craft of writing.  I've read all (or parts of all) of them. Some are written in a humorless authoritarian voice that sounds like it came down from On High along with the Ten Commandments.  Some provide a seemingly workable  map to fame and fortune in the business of writing or to popularity and universal acclaim in the business of life.

Some give the reader lists of things to write about, which I never feel compelled to do since the writer of the advice book thought of them first.  Several of these books give good solid advice by well-known writers and reading them is like attending a writing conference.

Though I've never met Anne personally, even when I hung out in the bookstore in Marin County three years ago hoping she'd show up, she's great company, whether you want to write or not. About every page or two, I look up from the page and look out the window to the bird feeders on my happy deck and notice that I'm smiling.

Just now, when I did that, I noticed that when we decorated the happy deck, I'd hung a yellow and green cartoony iguana on the wall, and it seems fitting that she's out there the day after I bought a Tiguan (tiger/iguana) car.  It's like a little jokey sign telling me which car to pick, and it's been there all the time.