Special Guests
Anne Lamott was born in 1954 in San Francisco, California. Anne Lamott, the daughter of the writer Kenneth Lamott, grew up in Marin County, north of San Francisco. She attended Goycher College in Maryland on a tennis scholarship. There, she wrote for the school newspaper, but dropped out after two years and returned to San Francisco. After a brief stint writing for Women Sports magazine, she began working on short pieces. The diagnosis of her father's brain cancer prompted her to write her first novel, Hard Laughter, published by Viking in 1980. She has since written several more novels and works of nonfiction.
While Ann Lamott is well known and loved for her novels, she also wrote Rosie, Joe Jones, Blue Shoe, All New People, and Crooked Little Heart, a popular nonfiction piece. Operating Instructions was her raw and honest account of becoming a single mother and chronicle of her son's first year of life.
In 2010, Lamott published Imperfect Birds. In it, Lamott explores teenage drug abuse and its consequences with her trademark humor.
In 2012's Some Assembly Required, Lamott revisits the topic of child-rearing that she mined so well in Operating Instructions, except this time from a grandmother's point of view. In this memoir, Lamott takes her readers through the birth and first year of the life of her grandson, Jax, the son of her then nineteen-year-old son Sam. Taken from the notes of her journal during that year, Some Assembly Required also includes other happenings including a trip she takes to India in which she carries readers away with her visceral descriptions.