Tidbit, Tidbit, Tidbit! Say it Three Times Fast--Much Easier than Typing it the Same Amount of Times

Time for a tidbit about our December featured author.

Anne Lamott's first novel, Hard Laughter, was published when she was twenty-six years old. This is according to the blurb in the back of her book Bird by Bird. It sounds like she graduated from college and began to write in earnest. Of course it was not all as neat and tidy as that, she'd tell you.

In fact, she only felt like she had a real story to tell when her father began dying of brain cancer. That was when she wrote her first book which would be published a few years later.

What a hard thing to do. To search her soul and watch her father die and get it down on the page. My parents are not dying and I would still find it an almost impossible task to set down their true stories. Maybe I don't have the story to tell yet. I don't have a large enough blanket of optimism to protect me from what I see as the cold truth.

I admire Lamott's ability to write the truth even when it's not flattering and still produce a work of writing that helps people out of their darkness instead of pushing them further in. That's a gift.