Anne Lamott

Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
-Print: COPYRIGHT ©: 4/6/2010; ISBN 978-1594487514; PUBLISHER: Riverhead Books; PAGES: 288; UNABRIDGED (Hardcover Info from Amazon)
-Digital: COPYRIGHT ©: 4/6/2010; ISBN:9781101186343; PUBLISHER: Riverhead Books; PAGES: 290; UNABRIDGED. (Kindle Info from Amazon and it’s “Read Sample” edition.)
*Audio: COPYRIGHT ©: 4/6/2010; PUBLISHER: Penguin Audio; DURATION: 11 hours, 22 minutes; Unabridged; (Audiobook Info from Amazon/Audible)
-Feature Film or tv: Not that I’m aware.

SERIES: No

MAIN CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive)
Elizabeth Ferguson – Protagonist woman nearing fifty, mother of a teenager
Rosie Ferguson – Elizabeth’s daughter
James Ferguson – Elizabeth’s 2nd Husband, Rosie’s step-father
Andrew – Elizabeth’s deceased first husband
Alice – Rosie’s friend
Jody – Rosie’s friend
Lank – James’s best friend
Rae – Lank’s wife and Elizabeth’s friend
Fenn – Rosie’s love interest

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: A podcast about books quoted Anne Lamott’s description of a librarian. I liked the description so decided to find a book by that author, in hopes I might just pick the one quoted, as it wasn’t mention what book the quote was in, if any.
-ABOUT: A mother and step-father with their own history of substance abuse live in a community with their daughter where an abundance of teenagers are abusing substances, some of them to the point of death. Elizabeth and James suspect their daughter, who has been the model of a beautiful and bright student, is falling into the trap. Elizabeth wants to believe her daughters excuses for odd behaviors, but becomes more and more convinced that all is not well.
-OVERALL OPINION: Well, I didn’t know what this book would be about, and it may have affected how I approach reading in the future. I may start reading brief summaries first. I don’t want to criticize too heavily what might be based on personal experience, so I’ll just say that I didn’t know until I began listening to it how adamantly I dislike anything to do with substance abuse. It’s a depressing subject and I fear literature might actually compel rather than repel anyone on the verge of testing those waters. To be sure, it’s a cautionary tale, and may well help parents going through it themselves, but just not my cup of tea. (Just an aside, during my college days, I knew someone from Marin County, and if this novel has any grain of truth to it as to the prevalence of drug usage in the area, it explains a lot.)

AUTHOR:
Anne Lamott (Excerpt From Wikipedia)
(born April 10, 1954)
“Lamott was born in San Francisco, and is a graduate of Drew School. She was a student at Goucher College for two years where she wrote for the newspaper.[3] Her father, Kenneth Lamott, was also a writer. Her first published novel Hard Laughter was written for him after his diagnosis of brain cancer. She has one son, Sam, who was born in August 1989 and a grandson, Jax, born in July 2009.[4][5]
Lamott's life was documented in Freida Lee Mock's 1999 documentary Bird by Bird with Annie: A Film Portrait of Writer Anne Lamott.[6] Because of the documentary and her following on Facebook and other online networks, she is often called the "People's Author".[7]”

NARRATOR:
Susan Deneker (From IMDb)
“Susan Denaker is known for Girlfriend 19 (2014), Alex & Jaime (2017) and The Woman He Loved (1988).”
GENRE:
Fiction; Contemporary; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

TIME FRAME:
Doesn’t say, but I’m guessing 1980’s or 1990’s
LOCATION:
Landsdale, California; Marin County (I’m guessing Landsdale is a fictionalized version of Lansdale, CA of Marin County.)

SUBJECTS:
Alcoholism; Drugs; Substance Abuse; Family Relations; Parenting; Psychology; Teenagers
DEDICATION:
“For Bonnie Allen and Jax Lamott
For Doug Foster and Neshama Franklin and the people of St Andrew Presbyterian Church
Thanks beyond words”

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Chapter “One: Parkade”
“There are so many evils that pull on our children. Even in the mellow town of Landsdale, where it is easy to see only beauty and decency, a teenager died nearly every year after a party and kids routinely went from high school to psych wards, halfway houses, or jail. Once a year a child from the county of Marin jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Elizabeth Ferguson looked around at the Saturday-morning comings and goings of townspeople, and saw parents who had lost or were losing their kids, kids who had lost or were losing their minds. She and James sat with their coffees and newspaper on the wide steps of the Parkade, which was what everyone in town called the parking bay in the center of town, making it seem a lot more festive than it was. It was a big parking lot that abutted the boulevard that ran from San Quentin, to the east, all the way out to Olema, on the Pacific coast, but several feet higher than the town’s original crossroads, so that you had to climb up steps to reach it, and drive slightly downhill to exit. A bean-shaped lot for eighty cars, it was ringed in skinny trees and foliage, lavender rhododendrons whose blooms wouldn’t last much longer as spring faded, and geraniums. There was a bus kiosk on the north side, and two weathered sets of concrete steps, the one where Elizabeth and her husband sat reading, another at the far end, across from the movie theater.
EShe and James were waiting for her daughter, whom they were going to take shopping in town if she ever arrived. Rosie needed notebooks and some summer tops for her last weeks as a junior at the local high school, and shops fanned out below the Parkade, stretching almost to the northern face of Mount Tamalpais. But Rosie was nowhere in sight.
Elizabeth felt large and worried. Even sitting down, she was taller than her husband (and her otherwise dark thick hair was slightly more gray-streaked). But Rosie was taller than either, almost five-eleven, black-haired, strapping and fabulous, except when they wanted to disown her, like now.
James read the paper in vexed silence and Elizabeth sipped her coffee and watched people go about their business. A tidal feeling ebbed and flowed around them, of people on foot, shopping or going back to their cars. You never knew for sure who would be there, someone you’d been missing or were trying to avoid. Two teenage boys took their spots on the bottom steps. Their pose was a flop that said, I’ve arrived and I’m not moving. Others stepped past them to get to their cars or up to the boulevard. Over by the bus kiosk there was a sense of marketplace transactions among the high school kids—punk, funk, hippie, straight—of intrigue, nonchalance, commerce, boredom, opportunity. On the main street people dropped off DVDs and videos, stopped to chat, ducked into the liquor store, flirted, picked up after their dogs or not, riffled through dresses hanging outside on racks. Elizabeth read the paper over James’s shoulder.
“How long are we going to wait?” he asked. “It’s been twenty minutes.” “
Five more?”
“It’s like waiting for goddamn Godot.”
Some of the young men converging at the kiosk had cultivated the look of homelessness, but without the inconvenience and hardship: car keys dangled from their belts as they drank four-dollar lattes. Some looked like star athletes, because they were or had been. But you saw a feral, dark energy in some of the young here, of despair, blankness, failure and indirect gazes, ill health, or sometimes, a dangerous raw male potency. The grunge, the piercings, the clothes that deliberately didn’t fit, that said, I am the best, I am the worst, the tattoos psychic Band-Aids to cover the wounds.
They were home here, and only here. You could tell by the loose-legged swagger, instead of the back-alley prowl they used at their parents’ houses.
Some of these guys had been to Elizabeth’s home in the year since she and Rosie and James had moved here from Bayview Two were Rosie’s friends from school, and one had briefly had benefits, which meant she had given him oral, as they called it, which Elizabeth had learned by reading Rosie’s journal. She had had to do Lamaze after reading the entry about Rosie’s giving Jason Brewer head. Rosie had lambasted Elizabeth after guilt forced her to admit having read the journal, and so she rarely admitted to Rosie that she dipped into the journal from time to time. Also, Rosie began hiding it better, but Elizabeth could always find it eventually, hidden in tennis racket covers, hollowed-out books, behind the headboard, under the dresser and night table.
Elizabeth rationalized it as recon, and found herself reading the journal on a regular basis. When she got new intel that she did not tell Rosie she knew, she obsessed about the dreadful news—for example, that Rosie had tried cocaine a few times last summer, and smoked cigarettes every so often. And when Elizabeth did admit to snooping—for instance, when she’d discovered that Rosie was not a virgin—Rosie rightfully went crazy and didn’t speak to her for days. When Elizabeth tried to break the habit and go without any new information, she fixated on the grisly teenage possibilities. So it was torture in any case, as Elizabeth had to try to keep the files straight in her head: what she knew and had admitted to, what she knew but must keep a secret, and what were only her dark imaginings.
So Rosie had given guys head, gotten laid, and done cocaine a few times: for God’s sake, what did Elizabeth expect? It was not ideal, but Rosie was seventeen and gorgeous and had been on the pill, for an overly heavy monthly flow and acne, since she turned fifteen. Her skin was under control now, with only small clusters of pimples, and she got much less crazy every month. The mention of cocaine upset Elizabeth, but it was apparently in the past, having not been mentioned again in the journal.
Rosie’s guys had smelled of marijuana the times Elizabeth had been close enough to sniff, and she had found a pack of rolling papers while snooping in Rosie’s purse a few months ago, but she rarely smelled weed on Rosie. They had apparently dodged a bullet when it came to drugs, knock wood. Kinna hurra, kinna hurra, as Jewish friends exclaimed, laughing while knocking wood or their own heads: no evil eye.
James glanced up from his paper again. He sighed heavily but got into people-watching with Elizabeth: yoga ladies with their baseball caps and rolled-up mats leaving the yoga studio; people in groups and couples and alone, shopping at the health food store or at Landsdale Hardware and Lumber, at the foot of where the mountain would usually be. It was missing today, but the fog was supposed to burn away by noon. She looked at James surreptitiously, with a sad and mooning face; she loved him so much. He was not the tall, handsome man her first husband had been, elegant and calm and amused. But he was her perfect companion much of the time, and she loved his looks: his crazy frizzy hair had been cropped and styled now. He had told his hairstylist to make him look like the gay scion to a great fortune, and she had. He’d also had his front teeth capped, so while he was never going to star in toothpaste commercials, he had the sweet pleasing smile of someone with a lifelong shyness about his teeth.
As they sat on the steps, James pointed out a tiny Ralph Steadman dog on a red leash. “It looks like an ink-blot test,” he whispered. “Like a little chemo dog.””

RATING:
3

SERANDIPITOUS CONNECTIONS TO OTHER READINGS OR . . .
I was listening to “The 6:20 Man” by David Baldacci just before listening to this one, where the play “Waiting for Godot” was a plot element (a murder victim had suggested her friend see it and there was some mystery for awhile around why, and whether it had been a clue to her death. It was.) This book also mentions the play when James tires of waiting for his step-daughter who is late for a lunch gathering, saying waiting for her is “like waiting for goddamn Godot”.

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
9/27/2023to 10/5/2023
… (mais)

"I am stockpiling antibiotics for the Apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen," Anne Lamott admits at the beginning of Almost Everything. Despair and uncertainty surround us: in the news, in our families, and in ourselves. But even when life is at its bleakest--when we are, as she puts it, "doomed, stunned, exhausted, and over-caffeinated"--the seeds of rejuvenation are at hand. "All truth is paradox," Lamott writes, "and this turns out to be a reason for hope. If you arrive at a place in life that is miserable, it will change." That is the time when we must pledge not to give up but "to do what Wendell Berry wrote: 'Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.'"

In this profound and funny book, Lamott calls for each of us to rediscover the nuggets of hope and wisdom that are buried within us that can make life sweeter than we ever imagined. Divided into short chapters that explore life's essential truths, Almost Everything pinpoints these moments of insight as it shines an encouraging light forward.… (mais)