is 50 today. The Writer’s Almanac tells this about Ms. Lamott:
[N]ovelist and essayist Anne Lamott … was an overachieving child: she got perfect grades and became a junior tennis star. But after two years in college, she decided that the only thing she wanted to do was write, so she dropped out of school and supported herself giving tennis lessons and cleaning houses. In the late 1970s, her father was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to write short pieces about the effect of the disease on him and other members of her family, and these pieces became chapters of her first novel, Hard Laughter (1980).
She wrote three more novels over the next decade, but she didn’t have any big literary successes. Then, in her mid-thirties, she accidentally got pregnant and her boyfriend left her when she decided to keep the baby. For her first year as a single mother, she found herself on the edge of financial and emotional disaster. She was too busy to write fiction, so she just kept a daily journal of experiences as a parent. She read a series of books about parenting, but, she said, “They just offered solutions to calm the baby or help the baby get to sleep. No one talked about the exhaustion and the boredom and the frustration, how defeating it is [and] how funny.” She thought the world needed a book like that, so she decided to revise and publish her own journal as the memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993). It became her first bestseller.
She’s since written two more books of non-fiction: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994) and Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999). Her most recent novel, The Blue Shoe, was published in 2002.