01.09.2010

A design for life: advice for aspiring writers was never so witty - or truthful —

Bird By Bird: Some Instructions On Writing And Life By Anne Lamott

Reviewed by Claire Scobie

BIRD BY BIRD is a beautiful, soulful laugh-out-loud book: the sort that you find yourself reading out to friends. Ostensibly, it’s about how to write. It’s also about motherhood, finding God and dying gracefully; about why we read books and the need to express life’s inexpressibly beautiful moments – the ones that change and deepen us.

Written by the American author Anne Lamott – political activist and former Salon.com columnist – Bird By Bird was originally published in the United States in 1994. This is the first Australian edition.

The daughter of writer Kenneth Lamott, she recalls how when she was a child, his friends – all writers – would come over for drinks and then “pass out over the dinner table”. Her father’s writerly advice was: “Do it as a debt of honour. And make a commitment to finishing things.” He clearly had a profound influence and in her twenties, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer, she took his advice to “take notes”. The result, Hard Laughter, her first novel, chronicled how his three semi-grown children living in the San Francisco Bay area coped with his decline.

As he lay in hospital, Lamott would give him pages to read and he’d “raise his fist in the black-power salute, and smile”. Before he died, he’d read the entire manuscript. While the novel, with its searing vein of self-deprecating humour, established his daughter’s career, for Anne Lamott it was a present – “a love letter” – so her father would know that “his story [was] going to exist long after he went to the great beyond”.

Why we write is not so important, neither is being published, Lamott likes to remind her students. What is more pertinent is becoming conscious: to use writing as a tool, “to live as if we are dying”. Such views are a reflection of Lamott’s personal journey from alcoholism to sobriety and her dedication to Christianity.

By drawing on her own experiences, she illuminates the trials of being a writer and there are many. Almost all her close friends – all writers – “are walking personality disorders”. Lamott herself is a single mum, melodramatic, generous, neurotic, with a “crazy pinball-machine mind” who suffers bouts of severe hypochondria and paranoia.

She describes how in her late 20s, wearing her “girl-writer dress”, she rages at her editor in New York when he tells her that the novel she’s laboured over for two years doesn’t work. “I started to cry and told him I had to go right that very second.” That night she drinks and takes enough cocaine to “resemble an anteater”. He agrees that she should have another go. Finally the book is published (no title is given) and it goes on to be the most successful of her novels.

There is no secret to this success, although Lamott’s own routines are instructive. She sits down around the same time every day – to train the unconscious to kick in creatively – and then tries to quieten her mind to “hear what that character has to say above the other voices [which] are banshees and drunken monkeys”. Writing is also about listening – to an inner voice – and she likes to imagine this voice as a “long-necked, good-natured Dr Seuss” who invents characters.

Chapters are dedicated to all aspects of writing – character, plot, dialogue, set design – and how to move beyond “really shitty first drafts”. She hoards ideas and whispers on index cards, stuffed into her back pocket. Occasionally she’ll pull out gems such as one about her young son, Sam, looking up at a cold starry night and saying, “It smells like moon.”

For all her compassionate intentions, Lamott is often at her most hilarious when she’s being bitchy about other writers, especially when the green-eyed monster grips her. If she’s brutal about some of her friends, she’s also brutal about using everything in life as material – just changing it enough so the person won’t notice.

At times the book feels like a passionate manifesto. “Tell the truth,” she urges. “If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.” Her words could put off aspiring writers or those foolish enough to think that it ever gets any easier. For the committed, she will inspire.

Pub: Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum Pub date: Saturday 10th of January 2009 Scribe, 238pp, $27.95