I started writing when I was seven or eight. She recounts her formative years and where she headed once she encountered that inevitable fork in the road where we can choose between being shut in and shut down by our traumatic experiences, or using them as fertile clay for character-building:

What makes Lamott so compelling is that all of her advice comes not from the ivory tower of the pantheon but from an honest place of exquisite vulnerability and hard-earned life-wisdom. (Available as a print and as a face mask.) One of trailblazing 18th-century artist George Edwards’s natural history illustrations. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around. One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore.

Lamott adds to the collected wisdom of great writers with equal parts candor and conviction, teaching us as much about writing as she does about creativity at large and, even beyond that, about being human and living a full life - because, after all, as Lamott notes in the beginning, writing is nothing more nor less than a sensemaking mechanism for life: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life ( public library) is among my ten favorite books on writing - a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time.

Lamott anne bird by bird