9. Some Assembly Required by Anne Lamott

Was I going to read a nice chuncky fiction next? Maybe. Did I instead read another memoir by a woman in a creative field? Why, yes I did. Fancy! Let’s proceed.

Perhaps Anne and I live too separate lives for me to feel connected to this book. She’s a white person with dreads who attends a basement church (I think it’s a basement church). Me, no. I judge white people with dreads and those who attend basement churches.

Like others, it seems, I can’t believe the baby boy from Operating Instructions is a grown(ish) man. There was a tantalising glimpse into the intervening years in the description that he "shut down and pulled so far away as a teenager that sometimes I could not find him". That glimpse is the stuff my nightmares are made of. Now he at 19, has a girlfriend and a baby.

I admire Anne’s capacity to accept and love, and her obvious pride in her family. I admire her honesty and insight into her worst behaviours- the manipulation stemming from fear of abandonment. But I just don’t connect. When her son- with a weeks old baby- says he’s going to follow some Buddhists (white Buddhists) he met on the street to their dodgy suburban ashram, her response is, “ok, me too!”. I suppose that if you perceive your other option as being losing your son to some Buddhists he met on the street, perhaps you would follow too, but­­­­­ what about just saying “that’s nice, sweetie”, and waiting right here in your house? What about saying, “uh, no, you have a weeks old baby”? And how does she reconcile this neverending indulgence of her son with her mean-spirited judgement of the son’s girlfriend’s body? She hates the girlfriends "gigantic" nursing breasts, and they frequency with which they appear. She makes constant references to the poor new mother's weight gain.

I should overlook the little digs as honest reflections of how hard it is to and rise above and grow over life’s slings and arrows, but I just can’t. Or can I? I’ll try. She’s trying. We’re all trying. We’re all in this together. Whether we feel connected or not.

________________

Surprise! I read 30 pages of my designated fiction read The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble, and then abandoned it when I impulse-bought a memoir by Rachel Dratch and read it all in three nights. So look out (ha ha ha!) for Rachel in my next instalment and Margaret Drabble in… maybe never.