The most honest, wildly enjoyable book written about motherhood is surely Anne Lamott's account of her son Sam's first year. A gifted writer and teacher, Lamott (Crooked Little Heart) is a single mother and ex-alcoholic with a pleasingly warped social circle and a remarkably tolerant religion to lean on. She responds to the changes, exhaustion, and love Sam brings with aplomb or outright insanity. The book rocks from hilarious to unbearably poignant when Sam's burgeoning life is played out against a very close friend's illness. No saccharine paean to becoming a parent, this touches on the rage and befuddlement that dog sweeter emotions during this sea change in one's life.


From Publishers Weekly
Magazine columnist and novelist Lamott ( All New People ) captures both the poignancy and comedy of her first year as a single mother in this wonderfully candid diary. Her quirky humor steadily draws the reader into her unconventional world as she describes her friends and neighbors in northern California, her participation in a local church, her experiences as a recovering alcoholic and--best of all--her infant son, Sam, born in 1989. She covers maternal emotions from rapturous bliss to bare fury ("In the middle of the colic death marches, I end up looking at the baby with those hooded eyes that were in the old ads for The Boston Strangler "). Throughout, she airs her strong political and religious beliefs. And when her best friend, Pammy, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Lamott conveys her anguish with the same depth of feeling and sense of the absurd that characterize her observations about her son, God, recovery, writing, Republicans, men and life as usual. Even non-parents will enjoy this glowing work. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This account is much more than a parent's chronicle of her initiation into parenting. Lamott, a 35-year-old novelist (e.g., All the Right People , LJ 8/89), recovering alcoholic, and single parent, here shares her humor, faith, friendships, and irreverence. Her descriptions alternate between joy and despair as she tells of nursing her young son and watching him grow. Lamott also describes what it means to be a single parent, the sobering reality of being alone with financial responsibilities, and the trials of life as an older parent. Intertwined with the parenting account is a parallel story of the serious illness and impending death of the author's best friend. Operating Instructions is enhanced by Lamott's colorful and expressive language, her philosophical reflections, and her descriptions of many eccentric friends. Although this book may not appeal to all readers, those who enjoy diaries and first-person narratives will savor it. For most collections.- Kay Brodie, Chesapeake Coll., Wye Mills, Md.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Novelist Lamott (All New People, 1989, etc.) nimbly plunders stores of self-mockery in her role as a new mother and single parent. Born August 29, 1989, baby Sam is ``like moonlight,'' and wastes no time in stealing his mother's heart with his beauty and his thin, ``Christlike'' feet. He and Lamott have thoroughly bonded by the time he turns into a colicky, crying, angry evening storm. Here, in regular journal entries, the author follows Sam's progress, fears for her milk supply, hates her thighs--which slap together with postpartum sag--and worries that she may be headed for collapse. She decides, in short, to give him back--to wherever he came from. He may be a baby, but he's scum. Still, Sam remains an endearing and veritable presence in these pages, but he's continuously upstaged by Lamott's wry efforts to get a grip on her ever-wavering self-esteem and her unwillingness to engage in any truth-varnishing when it comes to the ever-so-bumpy road of mothering. Through it all, Lamott's surrounded by a crazy quilt of loving folk who make the latter-day nuclear family seem quaint. Even so, the author occasionally laments that pivotal problem of single parenthood: that if she always knows where the baby is, it's because she's usually the only one around to hold him. Throughout, Lamott provides a sense of ordinary domesticity, interrupted and then rendered extraordinary by moments of peripatetic musings. One need not be a new parent to appreciate Lamott's glib and gritty good humor in the face of annihilating weariness. She'll nourish fans with her entries, and give birth to new ones as well. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"A funny, self-mocking, vivid account by a gifted novelist and journalist."


"An enormous triumph . . . Charming . . . Powerful . . . A gracious book, with dozens of lovingly drawn characters and a deep, infectious religiosity throughout. It is also funny."


"Smart, funny, and comforting . . .Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-deprecating humor."


"Lamott is a wonderfully lithe writer. . . . Anyone who has ever had a hard time facing a perfectly ordinary day will identify."



Review
"A funny, self-mocking, vivid account by a gifted novelist and journalist."


"An enormous triumph . . . Charming . . . Powerful . . . A gracious book, with dozens of lovingly drawn characters and a deep, infectious religiosity throughout. It is also funny."


"Smart, funny, and comforting . . .Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-deprecating humor."


"Lamott is a wonderfully lithe writer. . . . Anyone who has ever had a hard time facing a perfectly ordinary day will identify."



Book Description
It seems no mother of a newborn has ever been more hilarious, more honest, or more touching than Ann Lamott is in OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS. A single parent whose baby's father is out of the picture, Lamott struggles not only to support her little family by her wits and her writing, but to stay sober at the same time. Faith in God helps; so does her loyal band of helpers, from her childless best friend Pammy to her mother and "Aunt Dudu" to the folks at the La Leche League hotline. And between colic, wheat-free diets, and the triumph of solid food, Lamott learns that blessings and losses come together, and that as our capacity for joy increases, so does our capacity for grief.
"An enormous triumph . . . Charming . . . Powerful . . . A gracious book, with dozens of lovingly drawn characters and a deep, infectious religiosity throughout. It is also funny." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Smart, funny and comforting . . . Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-deprecating humor." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review



From the Publisher
Anne Lamott is someone I can truly relate too; single, in her thirties and full of many of the insecurities that independent women have. When she gets pregnant and her best friend develops cancer, she unlike most of us can write about all this with a heartbreaking clarity few can match. On top of this Anne Lamott is incredibly funny.

I'm a sales rep for Ballantine books and this has been one of my favorite books to sell over the years. But if I was to quit tomorrow I would still be talking about this book. It is a book I have given to countless friends the past few years. Expectant parents especially, both men and women love this book because Lamott is able to verbalize the entire spectrum of emotions a child can bring into their lives.
        --Karen Hayes, Sales Rep.


From the Author
A wonderful book, funny, unbelievably tender, and smart. It shimmers. Anne Lamott, author of OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS


From the Inside Flap
It seems no mother of a newborn has ever been more hilarious, more honest, or more touching than Ann Lamott is in OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS. A single parent whose baby's father is out of the picture, Lamott struggles not only to support her little family by her wits and her writing, but to stay sober at the same time. Faith in God helps; so does her loyal band of helpers, from her childless best friend Pammy to her mother and "Aunt Dudu" to the folks at the La Leche League hotline. And between colic, wheat-free diets, and the triumph of solid food, Lamott learns that blessings and losses come together, and that as our capacity for joy increases, so does our capacity for grief.
"An enormous triumph . . . Charming . . . Powerful . . . A gracious book, with dozens of lovingly drawn characters and a deep, infectious religiosity throughout. It is also funny." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Smart, funny and comforting . . . Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-deprecating humor." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review


From the Back Cover
"A funny, self-mocking, vivid account by a gifted novelist and journalist."


"An enormous triumph . . . Charming . . . Powerful . . . A gracious book, with dozens of lovingly drawn characters and a deep, infectious religiosity throughout. It is also funny."


"Smart, funny, and comforting . . .Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-deprecating humor."


"Lamott is a wonderfully lithe writer. . . . Anyone who has ever had a hard time facing a perfectly ordinary day will identify."



About the Author
Anne Lamott is the bestselling author of Bird by Bird and Traveling Mercies and of five novels, including Rosie and Crooked Little Heart. She lives in Fairfax, California, with her son.

ANNOTATION

It seems no mother of a newborn has ever been more hilarious, more honest, or more touching than Lamott is within these pages. As a single parent she struggles to support her little family by her wits and writing, learning that blessings and losses come together.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"I woke up with a start at 4:00 one morning and realized that I was very, very pregnant." So begins novelist Aniie Lamott's journal of the birth of her son, Sam, and their first year together. She must face complicated circumstances of heroic proportions. A single mother who must support herself and her son entirely by her wit and craft, she is also a recovering alcoholic, clean and sober for more than three years. Newly and militantly on her own side, she remains dangerously close to memories of days when she "couldn't take decent care of cats." Fortunately, Lamott is one of the world's funniest people. And she desperately needs her sense of humor as she chronicles her new life with Sam. Plagued by the normal worries of all first-time mothers, she adds her concern that she is "much too self-centered, cynical, and edgy to raise a baby." One false step will turn her sweet, big-eyed boy into an ax murderer. And no matter how well she handles things Sam will still have to get through the seventh grade. Even in exhaustion and despair, she is buoyed up by her deepening religious faith and her somewhat eccentric extended fimily, friends who offer her great love and loyalty and are much-needed replacements for Sam's absent father. But this year of new beginnings suddenly includes the beginning of an end. Lamott's best friend since childhood, her birth coach and a daily companion to her and Sam, is diagnosed as having terminal cancer. As Lamott copes with the vexations of single motherhood, she must also accept this unimaginable loss. Facing both joy and grief greater than any she has ever known, she must find within herself the capacity to continue. Her courageous commentary, narrating days barely balanced between angst and strength, fills this journal of a year when "sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it al] feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly."

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Magazine columnist and novelist Lamott ( All New People ) captures both the poignancy and comedy of her first year as a single mother in this wonderfully candid diary. Her quirky humor steadily draws the reader into her unconventional world as she describes her friends and neighbors in northern California, her participation in a local church, her experiences as a recovering alcoholic and--best of all--her infant son, Sam, born in 1989. She covers maternal emotions from rapturous bliss to bare fury (``In the middle of the colic death marches, I end up looking at the baby with those hooded eyes that were in the old ads for The Boston Strangler ''). Throughout, she airs her strong political and religious beliefs. And when her best friend, Pammy, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Lamott conveys her anguish with the same depth of feeling and sense of the absurd that characterize her observations about her son, God, recovery, writing, Republicans, men and life as usual. Even non-parents will enjoy this glowing work. (May)

Library Journal