Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott, Ann Lamott

From Barnes & Noble

Anne Lamott, the author of such novels as Rosie and Crooked Little Heart and the fiction writer's bible, Bird by Bird, has written a new memoir, Traveling Mercies, about her own journey toward spirituality and the way her faith has influenced her life.

From the Publisher

Anne Lamott claims the two best prayers she knows are: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." She has a friend whose morning prayer each day is "Whatever," and whose evening prayer is "Oh, well." Anne thinks of Jesus as "Casper the friendly savior" and describes God as "one crafty mother."

Despite--or because of--her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. Since Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, her fans have been waiting for her to write the book that explained how she came to the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alluded to in her two earlier nonfiction books. The people in Anne Lamott's real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers--her friend Pammy, her son, Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. And Traveling Mercies is a welcome return to those lives, as well as an introduction to new companions Lamott treats with the same candor, insight, and tenderness.

Lamott's faith isn't about easy answers, which is part of what endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. As she puts it, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers." At once tough, personal, affectionate, wise, and very funny, Traveling Mercies tells in exuberant detail how Anne Lamott learned to shine the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life, exposing surprising pockets of meaning and hope.

New Yorker

Anne Lamott is a cause for celebration. [Her] real genius lies in capturing the ineffable, describing not perfect moments, but imperfect ones...perfectly. She is nothing short of miraculous.

Newsweek

Lamott writes about subjects that begin with capital letters (alcoholism, motherhood, Jesus). But armed with self-effacing humor and ruthless honesty—call it a lower-case approach to life's Big Questions—she converts potential op-ed boilerplate into enchantment.

Los Angeles Times

Smart, funny, and comforting...Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-deprecating humor.

Seattle Times

[She is] sidesplittingly funny, patiently wise, and alternately cranky and kind.

Entertainment Weekly

Much of Lamott's writing is delightful...

Thomas Fields-Meyer

Hallelujah...a refreshing sense of humanity that has you guffawing on one page and bawling on the next. —People Magazine

Women's Review of Books

...[C]ontributes to a growing literature of self-disclosure by women that unites the worlds of feminism and addiction...

Book Magazine

...Lamott's greatest gift is making [readers] feel their own imperfect lives are worth salvaging, that it's okay to be bitchy, confused and selfish.

Publishers Weekly

Lamott (Bird by Bird) reads a collection of her autobiographical essays, each a heart-wrenching detailing of a life grown up in a world of obsessions: food, alcohol, drugs and relationships. She tells of her childhood and early adulthood in Tiburon, Calif., where she started drinking and drugging young in a permissive 1960s-era disheveled household. The title essay, "Traveling Mercies," dwells on things "broken," such as her body, when she became a bulimic. Lamott's writing is honest and direct, and in her reading she presents her words with emotional insistence. She recalls episodes from her life with vivid ferocity, noticing how "everything felt so intense and coiled and M bius strip-like." As she has a son, sobers up, her search for awareness turns spiritual. The sum effect comes across like a hipper version of Melody Beattie's self-help classic, Codependent No More. Simultaneous release with the Pantheon hardcover. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A best-selling author explains how she came to believe in God.

Chicago Tribune

Funny, poignant...wise and insightful...truly inspiring.

San Francisco Chronicle

Hilarious and genuinely moving...her best book yet.

The New York Times Book Review - Alexandra Hall

Lamott is a narrator who has relished and soaked up the details of her existence, equally of mirth and devastation, spirit and grief...

Gail Jaitlin

Anne Lamott has a way of making anyone who reads one of her books feel like her best friend. Her tone is so intimate, so knowing and self-aware and humble that it is hard not to like her. So when they came across one of her references to prayer or God in Bird by Bird or Operating Instructions, nonbelievers may have been inclined to dismiss it as perhaps just a quirk, a new age affectation of hip spirituality.

Traveling Mercies, Lamott's latest book, will disabuse readers of the notion that her faith is just a side interest and not to be taken seriously. Lamott is actually quite serious about her Christianity, although she is aware of the seeming incongruity between her faith and her feminist, gay-friendly, bohemian/artistic lifestyle. But this is not a book that tries to convert its readers -- she is not trying to convince any of us to become Bible-thumping Christians. In a way, this book is Lamott's attempt to reconcile, in her mind and the minds of her readers, her faith with her attitude. She wants to tell us the story of how she got here.

The book is made up of 25 sections, each of which tells a particular story; the chapter entitled "Overture," which is the first and longest, gives a sort of overview of Lamott's life and family. Her parents, who were products of a Christian heritage but did not believe in God, raised her in a progressive, hippie-ish, 1960s household. She found solace by going to church with Catholic friends and in the home of a Christian Scientist friend.

By the time Lamott reached her teens, her parents weren't speaking to one another, and all their friends were smoking dope and sleeping with each other's spouses. Lamott thinks this may have something to do with her parents' general lack of faith in any kind of God. Lamott herself felt a kind of pull toward faith -- she said grace silently at the dinner table -- but was embarrassed to admit it to her atheist parents (especially her father, whom she idolized and whose unhappy religious upbringing had hardened him against Christianity).

It's not until she was in her early 30s, and in the very depths of an alcohol-and-drug dependency following an abortion, that Lamott wandered into a local church for the songs and ended up staying for the sermon. It was during this period that she literally felt the presence of Jesus Christ in her bedroom one night, huddled in a corner, offering her his love. This might seem a bit much to the average reader, but Lamott handles it with grace, eloquence, and charm, and not a little self-deprecating humor. "I'm probably about three months away from slapping an aluminum Jesus-fish on the back of my car," she says at one point, meaning, don't be fooled by my left-leaning politics, East Coast college education, or dreadlocks. I really am a Christian, just like Jerry Falwell. Well, maybe not just like him.

Most of the book consists of anecdotes from Lamott's life that are told through the lens of her faith. Perhaps "anecdotes" is too trivial a term: Many of these stories are of ordinary life crises (the terror of thinking her son might be seriously ill), and some are of extraordinary ones. During one very short span of time, Lamott loses both her father and her best friend to cancer, she struggles to maintain faith in her own writing, she is thrown by the burdens of motherhood, and she comes precariously close to falling off her rickety wagon of sobriety. Through all these things, it is her belief in God and God's love that carries her through, that buoys her -- and although she doesn't want to convert us, she does want to illustrate for us what faith has done for her.

Lamott's humor and candor are endearing, and this is a fun (if not always persuasive, to this reader) book. In the way that so many memoirs do, it offers us a glimpse into the author's life at its most difficult, illustrating how she was able to find the strength to go on. In Lamott's case, instead of 20 years of analysis or aromatherapy, she turned to religion. Certainly for those of us looking for something spiritual in a world that seems to be less and less about loving one's neighbor than about outconsuming him, Traveling Mercies might be nothing less than inspirational.
-- barnesandnoble.com

Hero

There aren't any chakras or foo-talk here—labeling Traveling Mercies a book on faith almost does it a disservice, dissuading people who hate that sort of thing to pass it by. But the book is about much more than God and spirituality...Whether dealing with her fear of flying, the loss of a friend to cancer, or learning to love her crazy hair, Lamott's essays are infused with charm and a calming grace.

Kirkus Reviews

Brutally honest, sometimes funny vignettes about affirming faith and community in the midst of drug-induced angst. Novelist Lamott's third autobiographical book (Operating Instructions, 1993; Bird by Bird, 1994) follows her usual pattern of cutting wit and wretched frankness. This memoir, though, is more spiritual than religious: Like many in her boomer generation, Lamott doesn't hold much truck with churches but has found a meaningful congregation all the same. It is a small, interracial community which lovingly incorporates pariah elements. Lamott circuitously chronicles finding the church (for months, she stayed only for the music, leaving before the sermon) just as she approached a crossroads in her life, finally admitting her alcoholism and other addictions, and starting out on the long road to sobriety (these chapters are among the book's most chilling, along with her struggles to overcome body-loathing and bulimia). When she was on the verge of becoming a single mom in the late 1980s, the church truly came through for her, with members slipping ten- and twenty-dollar bills into her pockets after Sunday services. Lamott remains an active participant, demanding that her son, Sam, attend church with her most weeks. "I make him because I can," she explains. "I outweigh him by nearly seventy-five pounds." Lamott also takes refuge in a wide assortment of friends, many of whom have to deal with life-threatening illnesses as the narrative moves along. In the face of these tragedies, Lamott is refreshingly silent about questions of theodicy, choosing instead just to be there for people in need. Friendship, she claims, is the best salve for anyone's pain, anyhow. Sheshould know; she's obviously been through a lot of it. Still, nothing here is self-indulgent. An anguishing account that also heals. .

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Q: In Traveling Mercies you are extremely successful at communicating the everyday occurrences of spirituality. But you write the book as a Christian. Did you write it for Christians? How universal is your God?

A: My God is so universal that it's mind-blowing. I just wrote it for everybody. I mean, I happen to be a Christian, but I know that there is one God. People worshipping goodness and love and kindness and truth are worshipping the same God. I didn't write it as a Christian treatise. God knows, I have never had an interesting theological thought or position, so there aren't any in the book. It's really about God, you know, goodness, kindness, a power greater than ourselves. I happen to be a devout, born-again Christian, so what are you going to do?

Q: You're talking about the goodness of God. There are times in the book where miracles occur. You talk about your recovery from bulimia as a miracle, and there's an incredible scene where you and your son Sam are in the sea surrounded by hundreds of dolphins, which also seems like a miracle. Do you remember having moments like that, great, good moments, before you found God? Once you found God, how did the meaning of those moments change?

A: First of all, I always believed in God. As a young child I believed in God. I wasn't a Christian until I was 31. I'm going to be 45 soon. I always believed that there was more here than met the eye, and that there was something bigger and more tender behind the scenes, which even as a young child I experienced as not being very tender or very coherent, or certainly not very touching.

I became a Christian before I got sober, so I certainly had a lot of druggie times, times on psychedelics and in the morning after a long cocaine or methedrine binge, where the world shimmered with a kind of light. But it was not always there for very long, and it didn't really hold up to much scrutiny, because it was probably chemical in nature, or else I was tapping into another world or another plane of existence or something. But because I converted before I stopped taking drugs, I had this wonderful year or so of believing in God, in really having a personal connection with God, and at the same time being stoned a lot. It was wonderful, because I sort of tripped out a lot on me and God, like it was Casper the Friendly Ghost, and we were kind of together at dawn taking cocaine or whatever I happened to be using that day.

But since I got sober and clean, which was 1986, I have seen what I would call miracles, not in the Medujigore sense or Lourdes sense but in the sense of things happening that really simply couldn't, that were just too good to imagine happening. I was so stuck in my bulimia. I was so locked into the obsessive madness and grip of an eating disorder and distorted body image that I believed I could never get free, and I had tried everything. Then, all of a sudden, it was lifted. I eat like a pretty normal person; I stay about the same, and I don't binge and I don't purge. I know I couldn't get to there from where I was, so I feel like something lifted me up and carried me.

Q:Where is religion when there is no hardship? What role does it play in a life where trouble isn't looming or knocking on the door?

A: I think that trouble's looming in most lives. I don't think drugs and alcohol and bulimia are any tougher than what most people are dealing with who are not addict types. Life is really pretty tricky, and there's a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn't live without. I don't know a life that I would say is easy on the inside. I know lots of people who are not addicts who have lots of money and happy marriages or seemingly happy marriages. I would say these lives are very hard and very frightening. It's terrifying to be a human on the earth, to give your heart over so entirely to a few people, and to take the risk of losing them. So I don't know those lives that you describe. I think that when things are going very well, when you're on a roll, you know that it will pass and that there's another side coming, because that's the nature of life; but that it's really easy to believe in God, to feel very blessed, and to have a great deal of faith and confidence that one is safe and protected beyond all imagining, because I think that's our reality. That's another thing I hope to do in the book: to help people understand how really safe they are, how really protected and loved and chosen they are, as seen through this one woman's perspective.

Q: Sam is growing up with much more of a formal spiritual life than you did.

A: Or more of an at-home one, because I found it in other homes.

Q: Do you think that he won't find faith because it's been handed to him on a platter?

A: That life hasn't been handed to him on a platter, though, is the point. He's been raised in a religious house, and he assumes that the Jesus stuff is true the way he assumes that gravity is going to hold up over time. I believe that he will leave the church and leave Christianity for a time, and I don't know if he will come back. I assume that like most healthy kids, he will have to reject a lot of it, if not most of it. But he has had unbelievable challenges in his life. He has had unimaginable loss. He has had several people that he absolutely adores die already. That's what I mean: Nobody gets off easy here. We have a very tiny house, these ratty, used pets, and it's all kind of funky here. But you take a gorgeous child in a very affluent, privileged home, with parents and a healthy, committed marriage, and you can't make a case for the fact that this child is having an easy time of it. It's just hard.

Q: A funny line in the book comes when one of the mothers says that Sam doesn't seem to like schoolwork very much, and you write that you want to scream, "No, but he makes inventions, you dumb slut, out of garbage. While your kid is an obsequious little Type A suck." This isn't what people usually think of when they think of born-again Christians. Has anyone reacted negatively to the spirituality you represent?

A: The people at my church don't sound like that either, I want to make it clear. They're all really lovely and soft-spoken good people. I can only tell the truth in my own voice. I can only tell the truth as I understand the directive inside me to do that. Part of what I have to offer is that I can be funny, and I can take this stuff that there's usually a lot of hush and reverence around and do my take on it. For you to say that it doesn't sound like a born-again Christian -- we would all agree with that, because born-again Christians seem to be part of the Moral Majority. The right wing in America has appropriated the Bible and its teachings for its own political purposes, but it doesn't have to do with what's real.

Q: In the book you say that you're "probably about three months away from slapping an aluminum Jesus-fish" on the back of your car. Have you done it yet?

A: Oh, this is so awful, this is going to make no one ever buy my books again. It's going to show what a fly-by-night, watery faith I have, but I did put a Jesus fish on our very old, funky Volkswagen convertible. I put a fish on because someone sent me one. I didn't actually have to go buy it, which would have put me over the edge, to sneak into the Christian general store to buy one. Then, see, cheap slut that I am, when I was trying to sell the car, I took it off. I thought, Only Christians will want this car. Then I thought, I'm like Peter when the cock crows three times, and all three times he denies ever having heard of Jesus: "No, no, I don't think so.... No, never heard of the guy...." And the car didn't sell. I should probably go buy another one.

Hilary Liftin is the coauthor of Dear Exile, due out this spring.

Reading Group Guide

1. Lamott explains, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another.... Yet each step brought me closer to the ample verdant pad of faith on which I somehow stay afloat today" (3). Yet on page 51 she notes that there was a actually a moment of "conversion." How would you describe the process by which she came to religion? Is there necessarily a spiritual component to emerging from an addiction?

2. Lamott writes of her parents and their friends, "they were fifties Cheever people, with their cocktails and affairs" (10). Is this the reason for Anne's powerful girlhood desire to escape her family and to be "adopted" by the mothers of her friends? Judging from the evidence she offers in the section called "Lily Pads, " what was lacking in her own home that she needed?

3. In her earlier book Operating Instructions, Lamott explored the enormous changes that the birth of a child brings to a woman's life. What do you think of her decision, after terminating an earlier pregnancy, to have this baby on her own, and what do you think of the response of the people at St. Andrew's? What does Traveling Mercies tell us about the role of of community in raising children? How does it expand our notions of what a family is?

4. What particular challenges does raising a child bring to Lamott's life as a Christian? How does she handle some of the crises of maternal decision-making, such as the episode of Sam's desire to go paragliding on his seventh birthday?

5. Lamott writes, "Families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness--when you can forgive your family, you can learn to pardon anyone"(223), and "Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past" (217). Do you agree with these two statements? Why is forgiveness so important in spiritual life?

6. If Lamott had not been an alcoholic, do you think she would eventually have found faith anyway? Is coming to faith a matter of fate for certain people, or is there a large element of chance involved?

7. At several moments in this story Anne Lamott speaks of the events she is describing as miraculous. What is a miracle? How does she take the miraculous out of the realm of the extraordinary and return it to common life? What is the effect, for you, of her doing so?

8. Of her spirituality before becoming a Christian, Lamott writes, "Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus" (42). Do you find that, even after her conversion and formal baptism, her approach to Christianity is unorthodox? What do you think of her continued unwillingness to exclude the wisdom of other religions?

9. What rituals, celebrations, and memorial occasions are most significant in this story? Why are such occasions necessary in our lives?

10. Consider the structure of this memoir. What decisions has Lamott made in consciously shaping the story of her own life? What does she leave out? Are the choices a writer makes in writing autobiography different from those in writing fiction?

11. Anne Lamott gives the work of other writers an important role in Traveling Mercies. Verses of poetry or excerpts of prose are placed at the beginning of each of the book's seven parts, and the book as a whole opens with a poem by W. S. Merwin. How do these other voices contribute to what Lamott is trying to share with her readers? Which of these additional voices did you find most moving, most resonant?

12. Anne Lamott gives the work of other writers an important role in Traveling Mercies. Lamott is often preoccupied with her aging body and the cultural expectations of beauty. When she is worrying about whether a certain dress makes her hips look too big, her dying friend Pammy remarks, "Annie, you really don't have that kind of time" (239). Why is this such an important insight for Lamott? What sort of resolve is necessary to step away from the desire to be physically beautiful in contemporary American culture?

13. What role does Pammy play in Lamott's life? How does one adjust to losing a friend to cancer? How does Lamott arrive at the crucial insight that we should live joyfully in the face of death?

14. What is amusing about Lamott's efforts to impress upon her son Sam the importance of Ash Wednesday? Do you think that she was right in taking Sam to the ceremony upon the death of their friends' baby? How and when we should try to initiate children into the painful issue of our mortality?

15. What do you find most appealing about Anne Lamott's voice as a writer? Which aspects of her character do you most and least identify with?

16. What is the relationship between humor and faith in Anne Lamott's life? Is humor a necessary component of faith?

17. Why is community so important in Anne Lamott's life as a Christian? Is there a qualitative difference in a spirituality that is primarily private, and one that is part of an ongoing commitment to a group of fellow believers?

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