Book Review: ‘Somehow: Thoughts on Love,’ by Anne Lamott

SOMEHOW: Thoughts on Love, by Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott is a national treasure who, at age 70, is putting out not books but throw pillows with embroidered mottoes and little tassels. A lot of people find comfort in them and will curl right up with her latest, “Somehow,” a collection of inspirational anecdotes and meditations. Yours truly wants them off the bed.

It wasn’t always like this. In a world when many books are regrettably D.O.A., Lamott published two works of nonfiction in the space of two years that were C.O.A.: classics on arrival.

“Operating Instructions” (1993) was a scatologically exact account of raising her baby, Sam, minus a father in the picture, that presaged a brood of parenting memoirs, including Rachel Cusk’s “A Life’s Work.”

And countless writers have clutched “Bird by Bird” (1994), a guide to conquering the terror of the blank page during their dark nights of the soul. (Darker, so much darker, since the internet made words cheap.)

My introduction to Lamott was reviewing “Crooked Little Heart” (1997), about an adolescent girl named Rosie on the tennis circuit, for a different publication. I disagreed completely with the esteemed Benjamin Cheever’s complaint in The New York Times that nothing really happened in it. If you had any memory of being an adolescent girl, then that nothingness, which included a creepy spectator named Luther and a teen pregnancy, was everything.

Finding out “Crooked Little Heart” was a sequel to “Rosie” (1983), wherein the protagonist’s mother is widowed young and reckons with her alcoholism, was like walking through the wardrobe in “The Chronicles of Narnia” into a fictional world whose boundaries magically expand. A comparison more fitting when you realize that Lamott’s work, like C.S. Lewis’s, has a strong Christian subtext — when it’s not beckoning you right into the next pew.

Though religious, Lamott, a longtime member of a Bay Area Presbyterian church where she teaches Sunday school, is never holier-than-thou. If her fellow Californian Joan Didion slouched coolly towards Bethlehem, Lamott is forever fumbling toward transcendence, disclosing her baser impulses and littering profanities.

There is the indelible comparison, from “Rosie,” of professional jealousy to swallowing golf balls. In “Somehow” Lamott recalls envying another mom whose son is in medical school and modeling in Milan while Sam is at a low point, and her resentment of a female friend of a friend, with “perfect breasts, proud and immobile as the lions outside the New York Public Library.” (She can also be quite preoccupied with rear ends and jiggly arms.)

Didion’s California was ominous, remote, dry, chilly as an aperitif; Lamott’s is optimistic, accessible, earthy and — hand in hand with her Christianity — suffused with confessional recovery culture, warm as the cup of tea that is served at least half a dozen times in these pages. Only occasionally in “Somehow” does she invoke the bad old days, when she had to “all but army crawl across the floor of my houseboat to get us the platter of cocaine.”

In “Miami,” Didion wrote solemnly of Cuban exiles; in “Somehow,” Lamott takes a pleasure trip to Cuba with her newish husband, Neal Allen — though it’s not that pleasurable for her, because of the bad Wi-Fi — and encounters a pair of locals, wrapping “my aged imperialist running dog arms” around “the youthful ­ coffee-​colored socialist shoulders” of a young woman as they cavort in the surf, then discovering to her delight that her boyfriend is also in recovery, 12 years.

“Sí, sobrio. Alcohólicos Anónimos,” he tells her. “Bill Wilsonos!”

“Ay, caramba,” Lamott replies.

There’s no reason to persist with the daffy Didion comparison, except that both writers are mass-worshiped and occasionally scolded for their white privilege. Didion had dread; Lamott has dreadlocks. Instead of reclusion and spareness and a frozen youthful image on tote bags, Lamott seems forever available, just next door, sharing the creaks of age and experience in the media (including The Times) and on social media — and churning out book after book after book.

Cross-eyed from my own toddlers — part of Lamott’s appeal, to women, is that she seems to guide you through life stages — I completely missed that “Crooked Little Heart” itself had a sequel, “Imperfect Birds” (2010). That no one has packaged this as “The Chronicles of Rosie” feels like a catalog failure — but also of a piece with Lamott’s rambling career, which has slowly covered the publishing landscape when you weren’t looking, like wisteria.

In a moment of interpersonal crisis, her husband reminds Lamott — with a cup of tea — that she has a diligent “inner critic” determined to keep her “small and worried.” Very probably, she doesn’t need an outer critic, even one who hastens to reassure that she loved the glints of old Lamott here, like pointing out seaside “a species of small octopus in pink chiffon who looks just like Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

More Gabor — I implore! Fewer repeat steepings.

“Operating Instructions” was followed by “Some Assembly Required” (2012), a fainter reprise with Lamott’s grandson, Jax. She has seemed to curtsy, titlewise at least, to Elizabeth Gilbert’s blockbuster “Eat, Pray, Love” with “Help, Thanks, Wow” (2012) and “Dusk, Night, Dawn” (2021).

Though Didion wrote a play based on her best seller about grief, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” she mercifully never was given the keys to the platform now known as X. Lamott got in hot water when she misgendered Caitlyn Jenner in 2015. She wrote about this already in “Hallelujah Anyway” (2017) and is still trying to clamber out, fretting in the new book’s title essay about a fund-raiser for a law firm that does pro bono work for L.G.B.T.Q. refugees. (In the next one—“Tweet by Tweet”?—maybe she can soothe Swifties peeved by her exhaustion with the pop star’s ubiquity.)

Slim as it is, “Somehow” is flabby and sometimes cringey, defining love variously as “how hope takes flight”; “a pond or a pool where we teach little kids to swim”; “a bench,” “a root system” and “a windbreaker, fashioned of people who sat and listened and got us tea.”

To be clear, I love Anne Lamott. But when she writes of how a friend with a fatal disease passed gas on a walk, and a visiting rabbi blowing a shofar on a houseboat deck reminded her of the flatulence, one does flash unkindly on the remark David Foster Wallace attributed to a lady of his acquaintance, re: another national treasure, John Updike: “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”

SOMEHOW: Thoughts on Love | By Anne Lamott | Riverhead | 208 pp. | $22