Anne Lamott

An exploration of mercy, its elusive presence, and why people ignore or embrace it; shares advice for forging deeper self-understanding and how to pursue an honest, meaningful life that involves kindness to others.

Joe Jones is Anne Lamott's raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie's Caf, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck. Jessie, thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine, inherited the caf years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessies gay grandson; Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others...

Lamott explores how we find meaning and peace when life lurches out of balance; 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.

"In Anne Lamott's new book, she confronts the harsh truth that many of us grapple with every day: How can we recapture the confidence we once had in the world and in the future as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak? As bad news piles up every day -- from climate crises to threats to democracy to daily assaults on civility -- how can we mere mortals cope? Where, Lamott asks, "do we start to get our joy and hope and our faith...

Here, Anne Lamott enters a new and unexpected chapter of 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. In careful and often hilarious detail, Lamott and Sam--about whom she first wrote so movingly in Operating Instructions--struggle to balance their changing roles with the demands of college and work, as they both...