Letters to the Editor
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Quit bashing comic books!
Whoever did that delivered a low blow. Unlike criticizing Anne Lamott for her tacky, sanctimonious writing, it was totally inappropriate.
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Emily,
It kind of bugs me that people are making the argument that just because they are critical of a writer, they shouldn't be labeled "haters" or whatever.
This sentence makes no sense to me. Would you like to be labled a "hater" simply for disagreeing with or being irked by something? I don't hate her. I don't know her. I dislike her writing, which I consider a product of sloppy thinking. She irritates me, but she doesn't stir hate within me.
That's called reductionism. Acting as though we who complained think there are only two positions, gushing or demonic.
This position is reductionist as well. I don't suggest there are only two positions. I do suggest the extreme way some people expresss their pro-or-con responses to Lamott are two sides of the same coin. That does not mean there are't others who fall in between.
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true true
Here's what I mean. I've read a few things that Lamott has written and they have always struck me as being well-written, but astoundingly self-absorbed and, most importantly, utterly illogical. Whatever skill she has as a writer is dwarfed by her narcissism and self-pity.
True, aside from the well written part, which was perhaps an effort to sweeten it? She basically rambles.
most of the people responding here in very personal terms are projecting their anger at Salon towards Anne Lamott.
Also true.
But here's why:
Lamott isn't a rarefied form of "self-absorbed, utterly illogical" person. She's a typical sort of post hippie, kinda feminist, but not an especially deep thinker or together person. She has a kind of Bukowski + self help + feminism quality. Sorta a messed up person who is constantly tilting at windmills and sees her life as a heroic struggle, but really just needs to get over herself.
To be honest, I'd probably like her if I met her, socially anyways.
But, to those of us who've known such people well, they're incredibly frustrating and difficult the closer you get to know them. Precisely because they're often so well intentioned and self righteous, while being incredibly self destructive and difficult for those around them.
So the comments Lamott receives aren't exactly misdirected.
But when I read Anne Lamott and see that Joan Walsh is gushing over her, it obliterates my perception of the place.
True. I wish Lamott well. She sounds like she intends well. But i wish she'd write about something new, reexamine herself more realistically and lose the post-hippie, feminist angst, stuff, or not be published anymore where I have to be reminded of it.
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hippies
I hope you are aware not all "hippies" were stoned out acid and pot heads. Something happened around '66 or '67 when the anger and drugs took over. A lot made mistakes raising their kids, but it's a steriotype nonetheless. -- Ben Sen
There was always a strong current of anti-authoritarianism, counterculture, and radicalism for radicalism sake in the hippie movement. It was really a rather bourgeois movement actually.
The beats and bohemians had more intellectual integrity, and were more artistically creative, in part because they were a smaller movement creating the ferment which would seep slowly into the more conservative mainstream. Hippies were almost wholly derivative intellectually and artistically, riding on a "feel good" wave of drugs and rhetoric, and wholly popularized and made accessible to young middle class white kids with angst.
There was something fundamentally wrong with an orthodoxy of radicalism and popular culture of counter culture.
One way to define the hippie movement is: beats+bohemians -substance * drugs+populism+postWWIIprosperity
There are always some intellectuals and people who claim to embody the highest aspirations of a movement. In the case of hippies some were genuine peace activists, civil rights advocates, etc. But the real test is whether the mass movement actually embodies those aspirations, and the mass movement of the hippies didn't.
For example, other civil rights movements tended to shun hippies because they were flakes.
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we're all human here
I remember the first time I read Lamott 20-ish years ago -- her early novel, Hard Rain, which was a mess. But I loved it, found it funny and honest and gimpy and wise. There was something in there about one's butt showing, which, I think, is a hallmark of the human condition. That's Annie's gift to her readers, and it means either everything or nothing. (Hello? If you don't like it, don't read it.)
There's healing in her writing, and not only her healing. One nugget in Operating Instructions, when she's surviving a wicked stretch with her colicky baby, whom any reader with half a brain knows she loves down to her toes: She says, "I hate him. He's scum." How I laughed, a little hysterically there in my own baby throes -- how many of us found in those few words, maybe for the first time in any book about parenting, validation and permission for the underbelly of that tangle of feelings that is motherhood?
The most important things in life, the things that let you know you're alive, are the things that are both wonderful and awful at the same time. Annie Lamott sings that friction again and again. Bless her bones.
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Anna amazing grace
Aging like a good brandy wine.
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Honestly
I'm going to keep reading her and I'm going to keep hating her and I'm going to keep telling you about it.
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ok, whatever. so what?
she says, "I hate him. He's scum." How I laughed
Yeah, that's cute. It's quality is the refreshing honesty, the admission of imperfection. fine.
Unfortunately those nice bits are buried in tons of psycho babble and emotional baggage. Again, that's the thing with people like Lamott.
As far as Lamott's "ass hanging out" to make her more human... well if alcoholism and endless psycho babble is required to make a person human... proud robot here.
Not that I'm perfect, or even close, but I don't laud my failures or imagine they're somehow endearing either.
I got over the notion of Bukowski as charming a long time ago. The problem with such people is they're so busy trying to make their failures cool, they don't seem to be very consistently decent human beings or good at covering the basics in life.