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Fiction

• Hard Laughter (1979)
  Anne Lamott's poignant first novel, reissued in an attractive new edition.
  
  Writer (and sometime housecleaner) Jennifer is twenty-three when her beloved father, Wallace, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This catastrophic discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by Wallace's illness as by the emotional wake it sweeps under Jen and her brothers, self-contained Ben and feckless, lovable Randy. With characteristic affection and accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever closer in the intimacy Jen prizes "among the other estimable things: good music, good hard laughter, good sex, good industry, and good books."

• Rosie (1983)
  In Anne Lamott’s wise and witty novel, the growing pains of motherhood are portrayed with rare humor and honesty. If Elizabeth Ferguson had her way, she’d spend her days savoring good books, cooking great meals, and waiting for the love of her life to walk in the door. But it’s not a man she’s waiting for, it’s her daughter, Rosie  — her wild-haired, smart-mouthed, and wise-beyond-her-years alter ego. With Rosie around, the days aren’t quite so long, but Elizabeth can’t keep the realities of the world at bay, and try as she might, she can’t shield Rosie from its dangers or mysteries. As Rosie grows older and more curious, Elizabeth must find a way to nurture her extraordinary daughter  — even if it means growing up herself.

• Joe Jones (1985)
  Joe Jones is Anne Lamott’s raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie’s Cafe, “a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan.” Jessie, “thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine,” inherited the cafe years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, “sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat”; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie’s gay grandson, (“I thought he just had good posture,” said Jessie); Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday. Lamott’s rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, the power of humor to heal and to bind. Out of print for fifteen years, Joe Jones is a novel of hilarity and joy.

• All New People (1989)
  With generosity, humor, and pathos, Anne Lamott takes on the barrage of dislocating changes that shook the Sixties. Leading us through the wake of these changes is Nanny Goodman, one small girl living in Marin County, California.
  
  A half-adult child among often childish adults, Nanny grows up with two spectacularly odd parents-a writer father and a mother who is "a constant source of material." As she moves into her adolescence, so, it seems, does America. While grappling with her own coming-of-age, Nanny witnesses an entire culture's descent into drugs, the mass exodus of fathers from her town, and rapid real-estate and technological development that foreshadow a drastically different future.

  In All New People, Anne Lamott works a special magic, transforming failure into forgiveness and illuminating the power of love to redeem us.

• Crooked Little Heart (1997)
  Sequel to Rosie.
  
  Rosie Ferguson, in the first bloom of young womanhood, is obsessed with tournament tennis. Her mother is a recovering alcoholic still grieving the death of her first husband; her stepfather, a struggling writer, is wrestling with his own demons. And now Rosie finds that her athletic gifts, once a source of triumph and escape, place her in peril, as a shadowy man who stalks her from the bleachers seems to be developing an obsession of his own.
  
  Crooked Little Heart asks big questions in intimate ways: What keeps a family together? What are the small heartbreaks that tear at the fabric of our lives? What happens to grief when it goes underground? And what road must we walk with our flawed and crooked hearts?
  
  Brilliantly written, inhabited by superbly realized characters, funny and human and wonderfully suspenseful, Crooked Little Heart is Anne Lamott writing at the peak of her considerable powers.

• Blue Shoe (2002)
  A funny, warm, and wise novel about family and forgiveness.

Non-fiction

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life  (1994)
  "Thirty years ago my older brother, who was  ten years old at the time, was trying to get a  report on birds written that he'd had three months to  write. It was due the next day. We were out at our  family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen  table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper  and pencils and unopened books on birds,  immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my  father sat down beside him, put his arm around my  brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy.  Just take it bird by bird.'"

• Bird by Bird
  Annie (VHS), a documentary by Freida Lee Mock of American Film Foundation.   

• Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year (1993)
  It’s not like she’s the only woman to ever have a baby. At thirty-five. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all important first year. From finding out that her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out that her best friend and greatest supporter Pam will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but very little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events that make up a woman’s life.

• Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999)
  Anne Lamott claims the two best prayers she knows are: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." She has a friend whose morning prayer each day is "Whatever," and whose evening prayer is "Oh, well." Anne thinks of Jesus as "Casper the friendly savior" and describes God as "one crafty mother."
  
  Despite--or because of--her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. Since Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, her fans have been waiting for her to write the book that explained how she came to the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alluded to in her two earlier nonfiction books. The people in Anne Lamott's real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers--her friend Pammy, her son, Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. And Traveling Mercies is a welcome return to those lives, as well as an introduction to new companions Lamott treats with the same candor, insight, and tenderness.
  
  Lamott's faith isn't about easy answers, which is part of what endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. As she puts it, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers." At once tough, personal, affectionate, wise, and very funny, Traveling Mercies tells in exuberant detail how Anne Lamott learned to shine the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life, exposing surprising pockets of meaning and hope.

• Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005)
  With Anne Lamott's trademark wisdom, humor and honesty, Plan B is a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in our increasingly fraught times. This New York Times bestseller picks up where Traveling Mercies left off.

• Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith (2007)
  The sharp, funny, and heartfelt follow-up to her bestselling Plan B, Anne Lamott's newest collection is a personal exploration of the faith and grace all around us.
  
  In Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, Lamott examines the ways we're caught in life's most daunting predicaments: love, mothering, work, politics, and maybe toughest of all, evolving from who we are to who we were meant to be. This is a complicated process for most of us, and Lamott turns her wit and honesty inward to describe her own intimate, bumpy, and unconventional road to grace and faith.
  
  "I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things," she writes in one of her essays, "that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in silence, in the dark."
  
  Whether she's writing about her unsuccessful efforts to get her money back from an obstinate carpet salesman, grappling with the tectonic shifts in her relationship with her son as he matures, trying to maintain her faith and humor during politically challenging times, or helping a close friend die with dignity, Lamott seeks out both the divinity and the humanity in herself and everything around her. Throughout these essays, she writes of her struggle to find the essence of her faith, which she uncovers in the unlikeliest places. By turns insightful and hilarious, pointed and poignant, Grace (Eventually) is Anne Lamott at her perceptive and irreverent best.

Audio

• Word by Word (2004)
  Writing workshop

See also:

• Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Talk about Having Sons and Raising Men (1999), Patricia Stevens, ed.

• Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century (2000) by Marianne Williamson
  In the realm of highest possibilities, what could America look like in 50 years? What kinds of changes would have to occur in order for that to happen? How can an individual or an institution best contribute to such change? And what is the deeper story trying to emerge within this nation and the world?
  
  Best-selling author Marianne Williamson posed these questions to nearly 40 of her well-known contemporaries, inviting them to open their imaginations to all the possibilities that could exist. Imagine is their collective response: a powerful, provocative, and compelling vision of a better America and a prescriptive call to action for significant positive change.

  Between the covers of Imagine, an unprecedented assembly of America's foremost visionaries, academics, activists, and spiritual leaders -- including Anne Lamott, bell hooks, Caroline Myss, Dean Ornish, Deepak Chopra, John Gray, John Robbins, Marianne Williamson, Neale Donald Walsch,  Sarah Ban Breathnach, and Thomas Moore -- addresses issues of personal, internal transformation as well as institutional, external change, recognizing that the internal and external are not separate but intertwined, that we must find peace within ourselves before we can change the world around us.
  
  Today, America is plagued by darkness, home to a plethora of problems and millions of troubled souls. Imagine moves beyond the present, aiming a shining beacon of light on a brighter tomorrow.
  
  All author royalties from the sales of this book will be donated to the Global Renaissance Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to imagining and working toward a better world for our children and our children's children.