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A review by rebeccarennerfl
Almost Everything: Notes on Hope by Anne Lamott
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.