دستورالعمل‌های عملی: یادداشت‌برداری از سال اول پسرم

With the same brilliant combination of humor and warmth she brought to bestseller Bird by Bird , Anne Lamott gives us a smart, funny, and comforting chronicle of single motherhood. It’s not like she’s the only woman to ever have a baby. At thirty-five. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all important first year. From finding out that her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out that her best friend and greatest supporter Pam will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but very little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events that make up a woman’s life. "Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-depricating humor." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review "Lamott is a wonderfully lithe writer .... Anyone who has ever had a hard time facing a perfectly ordinary day will identify." -- Chicago Tribune "I woke up with a start at 4:00 one morning and realized that I was very, very pregnant." So begins novelist Aniie Lamott's journal of the birth of her son, Sam, and their first year together. She must face complicated circumstances of heroic proportions. A single mother who must support herself and her son entirely by her wit and craft, she is also a recovering alcoholic, clean and sober for more than three years. Newly and militantly on her own side, she remains dangerously close to memories of days when she "couldn't take decent care of cats." Fortunately, Lamott is one of the world's funniest people. And she desperately needs her sense of humor as she chronicles her new life with Sam. Plagued by the normal worries of all first-time mothers, she adds her concern that she is "much too self-centered, cynical, and edgy to raise a baby." One false step will turn her sweet, big-eyed boy into an ax murderer. And no matter how well she handles things Sam will still have to get through the seventh grade. Even in exhaustion and despair, she is buoyed up by her deepening religious faith and her somewhat eccentric extended fimily, friends who offer her great love and loyalty and are much-needed replacements for Sam's absent father. But this year of new beginnings suddenly includes the beginning of an end. Lamott's best friend since childhood, her birth coach and a daily companion to her and Sam, is diagnosed as having terminal cancer. As Lamott copes with the vexations of single motherhood, she must also accept this unimaginable loss. Facing both joy and grief greater than any she has ever known, she must find within herself the capacity to continue. Her courageous commentary, narrating days barely balanced between angst and strength, fills this journal of a year when "sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it al.] feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly." With hope and humor, she wrenches from the mundane rock-solid evidence of the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit. Her complex vision, inspired by joy, makes us laugh out loud With the same brilliant combination of humor and warmth she brought to bestseller __Bird by Bird__**,**Anne Lamott gives us a smart, funny, and comforting chronicle of single motherhood.It’s not like she’s the only woman to ever have a baby. At thirty-five. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all important first year. From finding out that her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out that her best friend and greatest supporter Pam will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but very little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events that make up a woman’s life."Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-depricating humor." -- __Los Angeles Times Book Review__"Lamott is a wonderfully lithe writer .... Anyone who has ever had a hard time facing a perfectly ordinary day will identify." -- __Chicago Tribune__ NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The acclaimed author of Bird by Bird brings her brilliant combination of humor and warmth to a'smart, funny, and comforting'chronicle of single motherhood (Los Angeles Times Book Review).It's not like she's the only woman to ever have a baby. At thirty-five. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all important first year. From finding out that her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out that her best friend and greatest supporter Pam will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but very little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events that make up a woman's life.'Lamott is a wonderfully lithe writer.... Anyone who has ever had a hard time facing a perfectly ordinary day will identify.'—Chicago Tribune

It’s not like she’s the only woman to ever have a baby. At thirty-five. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all important first year. From finding out that her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out that her best friend and greatest supporter Pam will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but very little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events that make up a woman’s life.

It seems no mother of a newborn has ever been more hilarious, more honest, or more touching than Lamott is within these pages. As a single parent she struggles to support her little family by her wits and writing, learning that blessings and losses come together.

The most honest, wildly enjoyable book written about motherhood is surely Anne Lamott's account of her son Sam's first year. A gifted writer and teacher, Lamott ( Crooked Little Heart ) is a single mother and ex-alcoholic with a pleasingly warped social circle and a remarkably tolerant religion to lean on. She responds to the changes, exhaustion, and love Sam brings with aplomb or outright insanity. The book rocks from hilarious to unbearably poignant when Sam's burgeoning life is played out against a very close friend's illness. No saccharine paean to becoming a parent, this touches on the rage and befuddlement that dog sweeter emotions during this sea change in one's life. It seems no mother of a newborn has ever been more hilarious, more honest, or more touching than Anne Lamott is in Operating Instructions. A single parent whose baby's father is out of the picture, Lamott struggles not only to support her little family by her wits and her writing but to stay sober at the same time. Faith in God helps; so does her loyal band of helpers, from her childless best friend Pammy to her mother and "Aunt Dudu" to the folks at the La Leche League hotline. And between colic, wheat-free diets, and the triumph of solid food, Lamott learns that blessings and losses come together, and that as our capacity for joy increases, so does our capacity for grief.