In Some Assembly Required, 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 forge new relationships with Jax’s mother, who has her own ideas about how to raise a child. Lamott writes about the complex feelings that Jax fosters in her, recalling her own experiences with Sam when she was a single mother. Over the course of the year, the rhythms of life, death, family, and friends unfold in surprising and joyful ways.
By turns poignant and funny, honest and touching, Some Assembly Required is the true story of how the birth of a baby changes a family-as this book will change everyone who reads it.
About Anne Lamott
Anne Lamott is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Grace (Eventually), Plan B, Traveling Mercies and Operating Instructions, as well as several novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.
Editorial Review
Such is Lamott’s (Imperfect Birds, 2010, etc.) message in this angst-ridden, occasionally neurotic diary of her grandson’s first year. After gaining a large audience for Operating Instructions (1993), which chronicled her son Sam’s first year of life, the author sets out to do the same after Sam became a father at age 19. Sam and erstwhile girlfriend Amy are parents to a healthy baby boy named Jax. In nearly daily entries, Lamott shares details of her life beginning with Jax’s first full day after birth. Filled with a variety of characters—Sam, the young father in over his head; Amy, the beautiful mother whose strength Lamott seems to envy; Jax, the almost-perfect baby; various friends and family—the book is mostly about the author and her seething river of insecurities and anxieties. At nearly every turn, Lamott comes up with some new thing to worry about, a new facet of herself to loathe or a new characteristic of those close to her to deride and belittle. She struggles constantly with boundaries as a grandmother, and she bemoans her lack of control over situations. Another source of near-constant anxiety is the prospect of Amy moving away with Jax. Other fears are less grounded in reality: “I have these morbid, terrifying fantasies—but I had the same ones before Jax was born, that the baby would die and Sam would commit suicide.” Eventually readers will grow tired of the author’s angst, self-doubt and general negativity. – Kirkus Reviews
Anne Lamott with Sam Lamott’s ‘Some Assembly Required’: Grandma’s first year
The Washington Post Book Review – March 20, 2012 (Excerpt)
“I was a young fifty-five,” she writes at the beginning of “Some Assembly Required,” the follow-up to her best-selling memoir “Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year” (1993). “Maybe a medium fifty-five. Let’s say a ripe fifty-five, with a child just one year past his majority.”
More particularly, Lamott wasn’t ready for her son, Sam, a 19-year-old art student, to take on the sleepless nights, money worries and never-ending responsibility of fatherhood. “I’d always looked forward with enthusiasm to becoming a grandmother someday, in, say, ten years from now, perhaps after he had graduated from the art academy . . . and when I was old enough to be a grandmother.”
But when Sam and his girlfriend, Amy, have a baby, Lamott discovers the third great love of her life, “along with Sam and Jesus”: baby Jax.
“Operating Instructions” turned Lamott into one of the most famous single moms in America in the 1990s, but she’s terrified that teenage parenthood will ruin Sam’s life and even more terrified that Amy will take Jax back to her family in Chicago. Because the young parents start talking about splitting up when Jax is just 10 days old, Chicago looks like a more and more likely destination. The relationship stress is especially difficult to watch for Lamott, who offers free babysitting, free movie tickets, free steak dinners and perhaps too much free advice. (Both sets of grandparents are essentially supporting the new mom and dad, because Sam is still in college and Amy, who has a cosmetology degree, is unemployed.) [Read the full article...]
On The Glories (And Hazards) Of Grandparenting
NPR Book Review – March 29, 2012 (Excerpt)
Nineteen years after Anne Lamott gave birth to the child she wanted desperately enough to become a single mother, her son, Sam, called with the news that he and his 20-year-old on-again-off-again girlfriend were expecting. “They’re both a little young, but who asked me?” Lamott writes, setting the self-deprecating tone for Some Assembly Required.
A sequel to Operating Instructions, Lamott’s best-selling 1993 chronicle of the struggles and epiphanies of her first year of motherhood, Some Assembly Required addresses the exhaustion, exhilaration and stresses of her grandson Jax Jesse Lamott’s first 12 months — from amusement at his “copious Newfoundland drool” to profound worries over his parents’ rocky relationship. Her interest is in how this birth affects her — and Sam — to their very core. To get at this, she intersperses her journal entries with comments she elicits from her son in interviews and email exchanges.
As fans of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Lifeand her three books on faith — Traveling Mercies, Plan Band Grace (Eventually) — know, Lamott’s great appeal lies in her security in exposing her insecurities, her refreshing irreverence even about her reverence, and her ease in tossing off hilariously offbeat observations. Parenthood, for example, is the death of complacency, “like having a terminal illness, but in a good way.” [Read the full article...]
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