Product Description

Anne Lamott claims the two best prayers she knows are: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." She has a friend whose morning prayer each day is "Whatever," and whose evening prayer is "Oh, well." Anne thinks of Jesus as "Casper the friendly savior" and describes God as "one crafty mother."

Despite--or because of--her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. Since Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, her fans have been waiting for her to write the book that explained how she came to the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alluded to in her two earlier nonfiction books. The people in Anne Lamott's real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers--her friend Pammy, her son, Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. And Traveling Mercies is a welcome return to those lives, as well as an introduction to new companions Lamott treats with the same candor, insight, and tenderness.

Lamott's faith isn't about easy answers, which is part of what endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. As she puts it, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers." At once tough, personal, affectionate, wise, and very funny, Traveling Mercies tells in exuberant detail how Anne Lamott learned to shine the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life, exposing surprising pockets of meaning and hope.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3896 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-15
• Released on: 2000-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
Anne Lamott admits that she's "ever so slightly more anxious than the average hypochondriac." When faced with a small, irregular mole and a family history of skin cancer, however, she remembers her faith in God and enjoys some peace--despite behaving "a little more like Nathan Lane in The Birdcage than I would have hoped." Author Lamott reads these wonderfully detailed postcards from her meandering journey to faith. With sharp and bittersweet humor, she recounts a past full of bad relationships with men, with food, with drugs, with alcohol, and worst of all, with herself. She battles her demons thanks to the love of her friends and family and her "lurch of faith" to embrace religion, that "puzzling thing inside me that had begun to tug on my sleeve from time to time, trying to get my attention." Inspiring but not dogmatic, Traveling Mercies is a treasure. (Running time: 4 hours, 3 cassettes) --C.B. Delaney

From Publishers Weekly
Lamott (Bird by Bird) reads a collection of her autobiographical essays, each a heart-wrenching detailing of a life grown up in a world of obsessions: food, alcohol, drugs and relationships. She tells of her childhood and early adulthood in Tiburon, Calif., where she started drinking and drugging young in a permissive 1960s-era disheveled household. The title essay, "Traveling Mercies," dwells on things "broken," such as her body, when she became a bulimic. Lamott's writing is honest and direct, and in her reading she presents her words with emotional insistence. She recalls episodes from her life with vivid ferocity, noticing how "everything felt so intense and coiled and M?bius strip-like." As she has a son, sobers up, her search for awareness turns spiritual. The sum effect comes across like a hipper version of Melody Beattie's self-help classic, Codependent No More. Simultaneous release with the Pantheon hardcover. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A best-selling author explains how she came to believe in God.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

pretty good book
I read this for book club and it was an okay read. The author does a nice job and the book is interesting.

Shocking but profound
In an e-mail exchange, a ministry colleague asked, "I have never read Anne Lamott. Do you recommend her?" I responded:

Knowing your heart for broken people and for Jesus, I can recommend "Traveling Mercies" to you without qualification. I have only about 16 feet of easily reachable bookshelf, including my favorite reference books, yet this is one book that I keep avoiding moving to attic storage.

Lamott is blunt about what she has gone through, how she has felt (especially about those of us who make a career of being nice), and her determination to keep Jesus out of her life at all costs. She is a product of multiple dysfunctions, and you can see why she'd have a hard time learning to love herself or to admit that perhaps God could love her. But I love the sentences by which she let Jesus come in; I have never otherwise heard such a simple prayer of conversion, nor one that is so true at the heart level.

My daughter-in-law said that if I enjoyed Lamott, I'd also enjoy Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk). I did, but Norris is more cerebral. Lamott is at once pithy, practical, shocking, and profound. "Traveling Mercies" has confirmed in me, probably more than any other source has, an understanding of how varied, unexpected, and original God's work is in any one individual's life.

"...I can always find my way home from here..."
Anne Lamott recounts the stories of her growing faith from disbelief to belief in a God who crouches down and waits patiently for her to open the door and welcome Him in. Anne recounts a harsh life of challenges with addiction, love, family, and herself. She shares her simple yet profound spiritual conversion careful to incorporate the people who have had some of the greatest impact in her life.
We catch glimpses of her faith story through the people she shares relationships with: her childhood friend, a Jesuit, the people (especially the older women) of her church community, and her son. We see in her life the mundane, the struggles, a person who can be gritty in one breath and sweet in the next. Anne Lamott tells her journey of faith, in a way that is not for the faint of heart. (or the straight and narrow) She packs this memoir with everything that life is made of and allows one to enter into her story and glimpse the God who unwearyingly waits.