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simplymary's review
5.0
Anne Lamott's voice is so unique...her blend of liberalism and spirituality (such an odd combination in today's world) is refreshing. She takes you down into the dumps but always brings you back up higher than you were before you started her book. She's one of my favorite authors.
cheesehead_reader's review
4.0
How have I not read Anne Lamott yet? There were more than a few times when I started yelling in my car... "That's me! I didn't know anyone else thought like that." But honestly I think this book is best read in book form. Since I listen to my audiobooks while driving, I can get distracted. I really feel that I need to buy this book to sit and savor it.
rebeccarennerfl's review
5.0
Read my interview with Lamott here: https://electricliterature.com/anne-lamott-on-how-to-hang-on-to-hope-51c708bae715
Here's the intro I wrote for the interview:
If the bleak daily news cycle has you grasping for some comfort, you’re not alone. Google searches for “anxiety symptoms” hit an all-time high in October, according to Google Trends. With the swearing-in of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and news that climate disaster is closer than we thought, hope may be the farthest idea from our minds.
It’s easy to assume that the only people who possess cheery thoughts like hope are those willfully not paying attention. But as Anne Lamott shows us in her essay collection, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, faith can exist side-by-side with uncertainty, as humor can with doom.
Almost Everything, as you might expect from the title, includes a little bit of everything, connected by the central threads of humor and resilience against adversity. The essays in the collection are small morsels, offering tastes of Lamott’s wisdom about enduring themes like faith and family.
The rest of Lamott’s oeuvre spans decades and genres. Her first novel, Hard Laughter, was published in 1980. Since then, Lamott has published 18 books, including novels and essay collections. While her welcoming style often uses wit, she has covered topics, like alcoholism and cancer, that many other writers find difficult to render on the page, much less joke about.
It’s more important than ever to find humor in the darkness. As many of us stand up to resist ingrained systems of oppression, whether in the voting booth or in our daily lives, with each setback, it becomes easier to see the problems of our time as insurmountable. But if we lose hope, we’ll stop fighting, and our struggle will have been for nothing.
Almost Everything offers a dose of levity, but it doesn’t stray from the truth. At a time when many of us, myself included, require that kind of irrepressible wit just to get by, I had the privilege of talking to Lamott about her new book, writing, and staying hopeful in these uncertain times.
Here's the intro I wrote for the interview:
If the bleak daily news cycle has you grasping for some comfort, you’re not alone. Google searches for “anxiety symptoms” hit an all-time high in October, according to Google Trends. With the swearing-in of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and news that climate disaster is closer than we thought, hope may be the farthest idea from our minds.
It’s easy to assume that the only people who possess cheery thoughts like hope are those willfully not paying attention. But as Anne Lamott shows us in her essay collection, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, faith can exist side-by-side with uncertainty, as humor can with doom.
Almost Everything, as you might expect from the title, includes a little bit of everything, connected by the central threads of humor and resilience against adversity. The essays in the collection are small morsels, offering tastes of Lamott’s wisdom about enduring themes like faith and family.
The rest of Lamott’s oeuvre spans decades and genres. Her first novel, Hard Laughter, was published in 1980. Since then, Lamott has published 18 books, including novels and essay collections. While her welcoming style often uses wit, she has covered topics, like alcoholism and cancer, that many other writers find difficult to render on the page, much less joke about.
It’s more important than ever to find humor in the darkness. As many of us stand up to resist ingrained systems of oppression, whether in the voting booth or in our daily lives, with each setback, it becomes easier to see the problems of our time as insurmountable. But if we lose hope, we’ll stop fighting, and our struggle will have been for nothing.
Almost Everything offers a dose of levity, but it doesn’t stray from the truth. At a time when many of us, myself included, require that kind of irrepressible wit just to get by, I had the privilege of talking to Lamott about her new book, writing, and staying hopeful in these uncertain times.
mindfullibrarian's review
5.0
This little book was just what I needed to start the year off. Incredibly timely, soothing and inspirational. I listened to it on audio from Scribd but I ended up ordering a paper copy for future re-reads and marking.
whitmc's review
4.0
Love Anne Lamont. Read this with a friend and then met to talk about it. Anne’s skills with words make me so happy, always. This book didn’t land with me as much as I expected, but I still underlined and started something in every chapter. I would definitely read it, although if you have not yet read Anne, start with Bird by Bird.