OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS A Journal of My Son's First Year

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And if you don't know Anne Lamott's work, she is a very prolific and successful author who has written books like Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird and Tender Mercies, many, many works of fiction.

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She wrote Operating Instructions.

She's written tons and tons of books.

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The first book of hers that I read was operating instructions which she wrote about the first year of her son's life in which I read in the first year of my son's life and I guarantee you we're gonna talk about that today because it was a game-changer for me her straightforward open honest daring approach to her work is just unique and she's not writing about easy stuff either her words on addiction shaped by her own struggles carry immense significance within the recovery community and have truly shifted perceptions on how we view sobriety and substance abuse.

I just reread it and I was I was reliving it and it was so difficult and I of course thought it was because of me and I my bad mothering or bad something you know you will talk about shame right and there was a me too part of that book comforted me away from all of it and there was a quote that I pulled where is it? Yeah my heart is so huge with love I feel like it is about to go off at the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life.

Yeah yeah and I know it's like all truth is paradox and I would feel like I literally would sacrifice my life for him and then I'd look over and think of him raising his ugly reptilian head you know and then there's a part I don't know if you remember it where the colic was so bad and I just thought casually about bundling him up and putting him on the porch for the night so I could get one night sleep and every mother worth her weight in salt said me too.

Oh yeah just not so you're not supposed to say that you're not supposed to say it there was so much you weren't supposed to say that had to be said in that book it was critical it was urgent that it was said and it is such a shock to have a child in so many ways in in the most beautiful of ways and in the most difficult of ways too.

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Nobody can do anything very much really alone. What a child needs, what we all need is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom and listen to them.

Listening is an act of community which takes space, time and silence. Reading is a means of listening.

Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It's an act. You do it.

You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless incoherent gabbling shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you.

Reading a story, you may be told something but you're not being sold anything.

And though you're usually alone when you read, you're in communion with another mind. You aren't being brainwashed or co-opted or used. You've joined in an act of the imagination.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions, the best manual we have, the most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life. Yeah. And why wouldn't that matter so much?

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Anne Lamott, whose first big hit was a confessional memoir operating instructions about the trials and tribulations of being a single mother.

And this week we have one from a guest we had on recently who wrote a book called Operating Instructions about having a baby as a single parent. It's Anne Lamott.

Hi, Alana. This is Anne Lamott and I love, love, love your work.

I want to ask you a question about being a single mother and preface it by saying I'm someone who loves to be alone and I loved my baby Sam literally more than life itself.

But there were periods of time, usually after he had gone to sleep when I would relish the quiet and the peace.

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In her first bestselling memoir in the 1990s called Operating Instructions, which also happens to be one of my favorite books, Lamott journaled about her first year as a single mom, but she's probably most famous for her 1994 memoir slash writing manual, Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life, also important to me.