Anne Lamott is the author of Traveling Mercies, Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, as well as six novels, including Crooked Little Heart and Rosie. Her latest novel, Imperfect Birds, is an April 2010 publication from Riverhead. Her column at Salon.com was named Best of the Web by Newsweek. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lamott lives in northern California.
On your nightstand now:
There is an overweight cat on my nightstand with her head immersed in my glass of water. Also, The Women by T.C. Boyle, who is, for my money, one of America's pure, great storytellers. Also, a book of daily readings by Philip Yancey called Grace Notes. He is my favorite Christian writer--so human and regular and wise and sweet and funny--and has hair just like me, which only eight other people in the world do. (Art Garfunkel is another.)
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Pippi Longstocking books gave me life and hope. What a marvelous creation, this wild independent girl in her one brown sock and one black sock, the horse on her front porch and her monkey, Mr. Nilsson. She was my introduction to feminism, to women and girls being strong and great. Also, all the Encyclopedia Browns--oh my god, each new book was heaven when I was a girl.
Your top five authors:
Charles Portis. My dad, Kenneth Lamott. e.e. cummings. George Eliot. Jane Austen.
Book you've faked reading:
There are way too many to mention. I've never read War and Peace, but nod knowingly when others are talking about the huge impact it had on them in college. Same with The Mill on the Floss, which I pretend to have read, although once I referred to it in fancy company as "The Floss on the Mill," which made it seem more dental. I've never read a whole Pynchon book but please for the love of god, don't tell anyone. Have never read A.S. Byatt, because she was rude to me once on a live radio show on which we were both appearing, yet I still pretend to have read Possession and Angels and Insects, which I can discuss passionately and in depth, having seen the movies, which I insist to listeners are not nearly as good as the books (which I haven't read.)
Book you're an evangelist for:
Blue Like Jazz by Don Miller, which is an astonishing memoir on Christianity without the religion--and it is brilliant, funny, wonderful, everything we love in books. It also makes me less embarrassed to love Jesus, since Don Miller does, too, and he is totally cool. Also, What I Thought I Knew by Alice Eve Cohen, a memoir about a woman in her mid-40s who is diagnosed as being six months pregnant, having been told her whole life she was infertile--and it is absolutely marvelously funny and painful and wonderful. I just read it last month but have gotten six other women to read it, too.
Book you've bought for the cover:
American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America by Robert Hughes. The cover is a photograph of "The Lightning Field in New Mexico," with the 400 stainless steel rods, and the cover is a beautiful desert image, but I actually bought it so I could leave it around and people would think I am much more esoteric and erudite than I am in real life; i.e., that I am capable of reading and tracking this book. Let alone picking it up.
Book that changed your life:
Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, Wallflower at the Orgy and Crazy Salad by Norah Ephron, Speedboat by Renata Adler. I know the correct answer is The Brothers Karamazov, Moby-Dick or War and Peace, but these four books showed me new forms--short, witty, self-contained, but part of something whole and big. Speedboat and the Ephron collections were inspiringly hilariously and helped me figure out what it might mean to be a woman. Evan Connell was a friend of my father's and the first man I wanted to marry. Mrs. Bridge was great literature, done in short and devastating miniatures. Laurie Colwin's book Happy All the Time gave me something as a young writer than I cannot quite put into words--the pure joy in reading something so human and sweet and unpretentious and unbelievably funny.
Favorite line from a book:
"The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."--Song of Solomon
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
My father wrote a great book called Anti-California: A Report from our First Para-Fascist State, about the years when Ronald Reagan was our disastrous governor. I was a teenager when it came out and I remember when the first copy arrived at our house and opening it up, so proud of my father's progressive politics and his elegant writing. If I could open that up again for the first time, it would mean he was still alive.
