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Review
"Grace (Eventually) Thoughts on Faith," by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 253 pages, $14).
Anne Lamott wrote about her struggles, revelations and satisfactions in books such as "Operating Instructions" (1993) and "Bird by Bird" (1994). Her gift for introspection veers from the confessional to the hilarious.
Lamott finds solace in her Christianity. She has written widely about her faith, most recently in "Grace (Eventually) Thoughts on Faith."
She begins this collection by declaring "there is not much truth being told in the world. There never was. This has proven to be a major disappointment to some of us. When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took me years to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me not to do."
In her essay "The Muddling Glory of God" she realizes "that whenever I want to either binge or diet, it means that there is some part of me that is deeply afraid." She embarks on a quest for her preferred painkiller, an apple fritter.
"Cheese Love" celebrates Lamott's difficult relationship with her mother. "At Death's Window" delivers a poignant view of assisted suicide. "The Born" tackles that incredibly delicate topic, abortion.
She waxes poetic: "If my heart were a garden, it would be in bloom with roses and wrinkly Indian poppies and wild flowers. There would be two unmarked tracts of scorched earth, and scattered headstones covered with weeds and ivy and moss, a functioning compost pile, great tangles of blackberry bushes, and some piles of trash I've meant to haul away for years."
A recurring theme is body image. She told me that "we look in the mirror and the trillions of dollars of advertising that supports a culture has convinced us that who we see in the mirror is who we are. And if we don't look like Drew Barrymore it's like our value as women and humans is really sketchy. There's a lot of exhortation to breathe through the reflection looking back at you and get on with it; the richest possible experience of this one precious life you've been given."
She hopes that women really see in the mirror and "it's a real deep kind of freedom to realize that its not you. It's like you at a certain age in a split second in the reflection, but its not you. It's not the juicy, wild, deep, profound YOU. It's just this ridiculous funhouse mirror that the brainwashing of the culture has convinced you could be improved."
It took her years to comprehend that "the culture convinces us that the road to happiness is doing well, getting 'A's, being a super sports star, keeping your weight down, staying much younger looking than you really are — that all of it, this external accomplishment will fill you from the inside out with value and restoration. And it's such a lie."
Book reviewer Vick Mickunas blogs daily about books at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 3/4/08; 1:07:34 PM
from the dept.
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