Where to Start With Anne Lamott Books

In Dusk, Night, Dawn, Anne Lamott explores the tough questions that many of us grapple with. How can we recapture the confidence we once had as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak? We begin, Lamott says, by accepting our flaws and embracing our humanity. Drawing from her own experiences, Lamott shows us the intimate and human ways we can adopt to move through life’s dark places and toward the light of hope that still burns ahead for all of us. And for more books on love, faith, and connection, check out The Comfort and Joy Collection featuring six of Lamott’s most popular books!

In this profound and funny book, Lamott calls for each of us to rediscover the nuggets of hope and wisdom that are buried within us that can make life sweeter than we ever imagined. Divided into short chapters that explore life’s essential truths, Almost Everything pinpoints these moments of insight as it shines an encouraging light forward. Candid and caring, insightful and sometimes hilarious, Almost Everything is the book we need that only Anne Lamott can write.

“Mercy is radical kindness,” Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It’s the permission you give others — and yourself — to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult. Hallelujah Anyway is profound and caring, funny and wise — a hopeful book of hands-on spirituality.

An essential volume for generations of writers young and old. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his modern classic will continue to spark creative minds for years to come. Anne Lamott is “a warm, generous, and hilarious guide through the writer’s world and its treacherous swamps” (Los Angeles Times).

In Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us — our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives. Lamott writes of forgiveness, restoration, and transformation, how we can turn toward love even in the most hopeless situations, how we find the joy in getting lost and our amazement in finally being found.

In this book Lamott explores how we find meaning and peace in these loud and frantic times; where we start again after personal and public devastation; how we recapture wholeness after loss; and how we locate our true identities in this frazzled age. We begin, Lamott says, by collecting the ripped shreds of our emotional and spiritual fabric and sewing them back together, one stitch at a time. It’s in these stitches that the quilt of life begins, and embedded in them are strength, warmth, humor, and humanity.

In Some Assembly Required, Anne Lamott enters a new and unexpected chapter in her own life: grandmotherhood. Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at nineteen, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson Jax’s life. By turns poignant and funny, honest and touching Some Assembly Required is the true story of how the birth of a baby changes a family — as this book will change everyone who reads it.

Anne Lamott writes about the three simple prayers essential to coming through tough times, difficult days, and the hardships of daily life. It is these three prayers — asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating what we have that is good, and feeling awe at the world around us — that can get us through the day and show us the way forward. Help, Thanks, Wow is the everyday faith book that new Lamott readers will love and longtime Lamott fans will treasure. And be sure to check out The Hope and Renewal Collection featuring two books that chronicle our human search to understand faith, hope, and prayer.

Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She’s intelligent, athletic, and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped she could be. But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, forcing Elizabeth to confront that her daughter’s deceptions will have profound consequences. This is Anne Lamott’s most honest and heartrending novel, exploring our human quest for connection and salvation as it reveals the traps that can befall all of us.

In Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, Lamott delivers a poignant, funny, and bittersweet primer on faith, as we come to discover what it means to be fully alive.

For those of us who are anxious about the state of the world and those who are dealing with personal demands on our faith, Plan B offers hope that we’re not alone in the midst of despair. It shares with us Lamott’s ability to comfort and to make us laugh despite the grim realities. Plan B is a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in increasingly fraught times.

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. 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.

Mattie Ryder is marvelously neurotic, well-intentioned, funny, religious, sarcastic, tender, angry, and broke. Her life at the moment is a wreck: her marriage has failed, her mother is failing, her children are misbehaving, and she has a crush on a married man. Then she finds a small rubber blue shoe. For Mattie, it becomes a talisman to the ever-unfolding mystery of her sweet, sad, and sometimes surprising life.

A personal, wise, very funny, and “life-affirming” book (People) that shows us how to find meaning and hope through shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life.

An exuberant, richly absorbing novel about a family for whom the joys and sorrows of everyday life are magnified under the glare of the unexpected.

In Anne Lamott’s wise and witty novel, the growing pains of motherhood are portrayed with rare humor and honesty. If Elizabeth Ferguson had her way, she’d spend her days savoring good books, cooking great meals, and waiting for the love of her life to walk in the door. But it’s not a man she’s waiting for, it’s her daughter, Rosie. But as Rosie grows older and more curious, Elizabeth must find a way to nurture her extraordinary daughter — even if it means growing up herself.

When a divorcée returns to her small California hometown, she encounters vivid memories of her eccentric family and coming-of-age in the 1960s. In this stunning novel, Anne Lamott works a special magic, transforming failure into forgiveness and illuminating the power of love to redeem us.

Joe Jones is Anne Lamott’s raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie’s Café. Jessie inherited the café years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters all living together in the sweet everyday. Lamott’s rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, and the power of humor to heal and to bind.

To the enormous challenges of being a writer, Anne Lamott offers invaluable advice and encouragement, which more than a million scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities have been inspired by for a quarter century, now an ebook short! In this selection from her essential volume, Bird by Bird, Lamott tenderly recommends and outlines the qualities that every writer should learn to hone: intuition, attention, morality, and more.