Anne Lamott preaches to her choir in ‘Somehow: Thoughts on Love’

Anne Lamott, a self-declared “spiritual ATM,” has long been on a mission to uplift people’s spirits. Her warm personal essays dispense insights into grace, mercy, hope, and faith by combining the profound with the profane, depth with deprecation, and gratitude with gripes. 

“Somehow: Thoughts on Love,” Lamott’s 20th book, published to coincide with her 70th birthday, celebrates the many forms love can take, and the many ways it can buttress and transform us. 

Lamott spouts aphorisms the way whales spout water. A sea spray of examples punctuate this book: “Love is a root system.” “Love is compassion.” “Love is what our soul is made of, and for.” “The longest twenty inches on Earth are from the brain to the heart.” “Warmth is love in its plainest clothing.” “Love is why we have hope.” “Love is a windbreaker.” 

In “Somehow,” these one-liners often sound like platitudes, the stuff of greeting cards. Lamott is preaching not just to the choir but to herself – bucking herself up when she feels she is not living up to the person she’d like to be. By exposing her own foibles, she hopes to assure readers that they are not alone, and to inspire better behavior in everyone.   

Lamott, who has been gratefully sober and a devout Christian since 1986, thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and her supportive church community, is ever on the prowl for guidelines about how to live best. As her book titles attest, she likes to share the benefit of her experiences: “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life” (still my favorite 30 years after its publication); “Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year”; “Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair.” 

In “Somehow,” Lamott asks, “What can I leave my son and grandson by way of general instructions for when I am gone?” Many of the lessons she’s learned over the years are destined for her “swag bag of spiritual truth.” Among them: “Be a helper, and dance.” Surely, her family members, like her readers, have heard much of this before.

Self-criticism factors into many of Lamott’s anecdotes. She makes fun of how she must appear to a man experiencing homelessness when she presses a bag of toiletries and sundries on him. The deacons in her church chose items for the bags that they thought an unsheltered person would need, including toothpaste and body wash. The man, perhaps to get this overzealous church lady to leave him be, finally accepts the socks and hands back the rest.  

"We humans screw up; that is our nature,” Lamott writes. She confesses that she has spent a lifetime struggling “with equal parts bad self-esteem and grandiosity” and trying to override her tendency toward “secret derisive judgment” – inculcated, along with self-promotion and perfectionism, in her childhood.

Lamott cops to her mistakes. She made a huge one on Twitter in 2015, when she tweeted insensitive comments about Caitlyn Jenner, who was then the world’s most famous transgender person. Lamott was branded a bigot on social media. 

Even after her mortified apologies, those tweets came back to bite her recently when she was pulled as a college commencement speaker. Lamott confesses that this triggered a reaction she’s also not proud of: “victimized self-righteousness.”

What she learned from that experience is to go to “the launch code when under attack: gratitude, chores, chocolate, service, breath, nature.” She reminds us that regaining one’s self-respect is “an inside job,” and that “grace in its guise as spiritual WD-40” will usually work its wonders. But, she adds, “my experience is that grace bats last.” 

That chocolate and “spiritual WD-40” are classic Lamott. So, too, is her penchant for sticking out her neck. Ever irreverent in her reverence, she is sure to delight some readers and irritate others with her occasional profanities and lines like, “Life delivers the unbelievable so often that you might as well believe.”  

“Somehow” is not Lamott at her best. But however familiar the platitudes, few will disagree with the commencement-worthy reminders that “serving others is where we often find happiness,” or that “to have loving feelings, do loving things.”