2025 #2: Bird by Bird (Lamott)

 

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've read many books about writing. I honestly cannot remember how or why this audiobook wound up on my list, but I'm so glad it did. While much of Lamott's advice is geared toward writers of fiction, the book is invaluable for anyone who writes (or frankly, reads). And if you want to get caught up in the eccentricities of broccoli as metaphor, that's fine, but...please, allow yourself to enjoy the comedy. Some of it is fairly irreverent and may not land 100% in 2025 social mores, but most of it is a lot less offensive than a lot of what comes flying out of the mouths of stand-up comedians. If you've understood life's absurdity through grieving someone close, you'll get it. Lamott's reading is perfect--think Lily Tomlin's character "Frankie" without the woo-woo stuff. And in between the quips and the sometimes a-bit-too-long tongue-in-cheek tirades, lo and behold--there are some sound lessons about "...being militantly on your own side," and how you don't want to "look at your feet to see if you're doing it right--just dance!". Lamott learned through trial and much error perhaps the biggest lesson of all: "being enough was going to have to be an inside job." Mic drop.

Proponents of mindfulness will value Lamott's observations such as: "You get your intuition back when you make space for it and stop the chatter of the rational mind." That seems key to a lot of art and creativity, not just writing. Truly, one of my favorite read-by-the-author audiobooks (sharing company with Anthony Bourdain reading Kitchen Confidential and Stanley Tucci's reading of Taste), and Lamott keeps you laughing while you nod your head in affirmation of the book's wisdom. If you find yourself in a slump (of any kind), give it a listen. Lamott's tell-it-like-it-is isn't doom-and-gloom, but instead very life-affirming. I've got a post-it note on my monitor now that reminds me: "bird by bird!"

View all my reviews

2025 #1 Call Us What We Carry (Gorman)

 Happy New Year. This might have been the perfect book to pick back up at the end of 2024 and to finish in these early days of 2025. I also want to note that I am partaking in two challenges this year: a 25 for 25 Follow the Leader Challenge (technically this means my next book title should start with the letter Y) and a "serious about series" challenge wherein I read one book a month that is a sequel, or part of series. I'm also dedicating 2025 year to working with my stash. I own far too many unread books.

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the front flap of the dust jacket, the book reads:

This book is a message in a bottle.
This book is a letter.
This book does not let up.

This book does NOT let up, indeed. "What place have we in our histories except the present?" (123) Gorman asks in "War: What, Is it Good?" The book is a memoir, largely of the pandemic. But to read it is remember that it was more than Covid-19. It was a reckoning. It was a nightmare and a dream. It tested all of us, not all in the same ways.

Gorman's gifts with language are woven through poems that rhyme and poems that don't, pieces of prose by Corporal Roy Plummer (1896-1966) interspersed with Gorman's verse, a list of scenes to make up a filmic "Monomyth" that narrates the crumbling of normalcy beginning in December 2019 in Wuhan, through apocalyptic brushfires in Australia, through the murder of George Floyd, ultimately to emerge/submerge into the Unordinary World:

"We are not all heroes, but we are all at least human. This is not a
closing, but an opening, a widening--not a yawn but a scream, a
poem sung. What will we admit of & into ourselves. There is no such thing as "all over" and "all done". (191)

The short poem "Anonymous" on 180 features white letters on a black mask, an emblem so charged with meaning in this Unordinary World.

The title of the collection, Call Us What We Carry, truly captures a sense of the book as a whole, and is not just a reference to the penultimate poem "What We Carry" nor the poem "Call Us" (34) wherein we find that exact line. Naming and carrying both feature in much of the work, as does navigation and light.

There are seven sections of the book: Requiem, What a Piece of Wreck is Man, Earth Eyes, Memoria, Atonement, Fury & Faith, and Resolution. These titles become more like beacons as you read through the collection and pick up the various threads. For example, in the poem "Lucent", which is the first piece of "Earth Eyes", the meditation on lumen, lucent..."Our requiem as raptus" (60) reminds us of the role of light in a requiem Mass (luceat eis, lux aeterna) but also how "perhaps it is we who make/Falsities of luminscence--" (61).

In the middle of the book, in a piece called "Pre-Memory", Gorman reminds us:
"Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free."

Yes, the book does not let up, nor should it. We need to feel again. We need to be free.

View all my reviews

25 for 25 No. 1 Call us What we CarrY