Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2018)
As she neared the age of 61, Anne Lamott determined to write down some things she knows about hope and despair, for the benefit of the children in her life, and anybody else who may be "both exuberant and worried." That is, by turns, any of us may feel the pull of the edge of the cliff; we think the unthinkable, or at least the unspeakable, all the time. Lamott's gift is to speak what's unspeakable, in a matter-of-fact style that, to some of us, comes as a great relief.
She's also more willing than most people to talk plainly about the miraculous side of life, that things don't always get worse; that in the blackest, bleakest night, love has been a penlight. She's talking about the kind of big truth whose opposite is also true: "Every day we're in the grip of the impossible conundrum: the truth that it's over in a blink, and we may be near the end, and that we have to live as if it's going to be okay, no matter what."
We also get, as you expect if you know Lamott, a bunch of stories in which her own demons come to the fore, especially her tendency to think she can fix the people around her. "The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control." It can't be easy to be her relative, or her friend.
How like life, though - it's not always easy to be anyone's relative, or friend. Relationships are always going to affect who we turn out to be, for better and for worse. "Families are hard partly because of expectations, that the people in them are supposed to mesh, and expectations are resentments under construction." The roles we take on in families offer us both constraint and comfort; they keep us safe while they make us crazy.
If you don't already know and like Anne Lamott, this is not the book to start with. Go back to her novel Crooked Little Heart, or Bird by Bird, her delightful book on writing. She's also been mining this current territory of thoughts on faith for a while now, and may be running out of new things to say.
And
yet – and yet – the old things are still worth saying, and
hearing. Anything that gives us the courage to face how tough things
are can plant a seed of hope, which skimming through life in denial
is never going to do. "There is the absolute hopelessness we
face that everyone we love will die, even our newborn granddaughter,
even as we trust and know that love will give rise to growth,
miracles, and resurrection."
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