Review: “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott

Neutral rating for Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Writing. RE-READ.

I read this when I was fourteen or so, after reading some brilliant quotes from it which Jon Winokur included in his magnificent collection Advice for Writers. I had high expectations: but I was disappointed. This time I began with low expectations, and was delighted when I found myself laughing out loud in the introduction. Unfortunately, I soon rediscovered why it had irritated my younger self. This book is brilliantly written and often extraordinarily funny. That’s what kept me going, this time around. But it does irritate me. It does not offend me if Lamott is a deeply neurotic, jealous, angry, vengeful woman; she writes about her neuroses entertainingly and with admirable honesty. The problem is that much of the book is written in second person, narrating what we, her writer students, feel (“there is a vague pain at the base of your neck”). And she ascribes to us her own neuroses, her own jealousy, her own anger, her own angst and low self-esteem. She seems to genuinely believe that all writers (perhaps all humans?) are like this, because it is true of herself and her writer friends, whom she flatly says are one and all emotionally damaged in some way. The problem is, I am not. I had a happy childhood. I am self-confident. I do not write out of “anger and damage and grief.” I have been blessed to avoid these things in my life so far, and I know that it is a blessing, but it does not negate the fact that I too write, for the reason that no one else is writing exactly the stories I want to read. And I think I am not the only one who writes for that reason. So, needless to say, while there are some great bits here, I was not and am not the right audience for this book. At any age.

“You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind – a scene, a locale, a character, whatever – and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are the voices of anxiety, judgment, doom, guilt. Also, severe hypochondria. There may be a Nurse Ratchet-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk. There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you have meningitis. Then the phone rings and you look up at the ceiling with fury, summon every ounce of noblesse oblige, and answer the call politely, with maybe just the merest hint of irritation. The caller asks if you’re working, and you say yeah, because you are.”