There was a time when I used to read many books about writing but I lost the urge as I passed my MA in ‘writing’ and quietly plugged away at my writing projects. I’d not heard of Bird by Bird until this year but for some reason, it kept popping up in my attention, the way things do. Then, I was in a charity shop and saw a copy, it seemed like fate.
Structured as a set of seminars, where Anne Lamott tells the reader what she’d tell her students, and also the things she’d like to say to them but probably wouldn’t. The book deals more with the writing life than writing itself, and the writing life as she sees it in particular.
I begins with a pretty typical ‘weird kid becomes writer’ story. Tom Gauld did this brilliant cartoon once where mysterious hooded figures come and take a child from their parents. The parents cry and wail, wishing they hadn’t gone to the library so much. The child declares “I’m a writer now” as they are taken away by the hooded figures. It does feel like that, some people simply get into these book things too hard and they are cursed to be the writers.
It’s in this first section that the first disquieting note arose. She says she loved to hang out with the oddballs. The oddballs are defined as “ethnic people, theatre people, poets, radicals, gays and lesbians”. I could generously interpret the statement to mean that they were different to the kinds of people she knew with her conservative background (and a later tangent on school lunches reveals how limited and conservative this background was) but in light of other comments, it does seem she sees anyone not from this background as strange. Soon after she says how all her stories involved a character meeting “someone like a clown, or a foreigner.”
I think it’s supposed to be a bit of jokey self-deprecation, playing a ‘bit’ on what a poor teacher she is, but she really has no generosity for her students. She mainly portrays them as irritating losers, too hung up on publication and generally rather pathetic. She sighs when they keep asking her about agents, and in some senses I should see why, the writing itself should be more important than the agent, but these are students on a writing course - of course they are interested in how to get an agent. What’s more, for her to dismiss the question about agents has a sour taste when you realise she simply used her dad’s agent and didn’t have to go through the process herself.
There is a good point to made in focussing on the writing not the publication, as there is in telling would-be published writers that publication isn’t the cure-all they are hoping for. There are some other good pieces of advice as well, the titular “bird-by-bird”, which could also be seen as word-by-word. Writing is a series of small decisions and work that lead to a larger whole. I like her insistence on writing at least 300 words a day to keep up a routine. I liked the reminder that plot springs from character, that a writer should trust their intuition and that the pain of perfectionism can be massaged out like a muscle cramp.
To be honest, it’s the reflections on life that made this a pretty unpleasant book. She really leans into the pain of writing and the self doubt. As someone who dreads the moment before I start writing and do all sorts to put that moment off, I understand where she is coming for but Lamott makes it sound like there is almost no part of writing that she enjoys. I actually have a nice time once I get started, it’s the getting started that hurts.
There’s also a lot in the book about jealousy. She condemns Muriel Spark to having “bad things rain down” upon her because she enjoys writing. There’s a whole chapter on jealousy and it’s really ugly. I think she’s trying to overstate her jealousy, create humour by hyperbole, but it’s just horrid. She talks about putting a friendship ‘on sabbatical’ because the friend was successful. It gets really ugly when she says about what got her out of her jealousy, a documentary in AIDS. She decides that if these people can keep going with the ravages of that disease, she can face her jealousy.
Another chapter is about how she does charitable work at an old people’s home and how she learns, shock horror, that the old people are people. True, not proper people, some of them smell of wee and have thinning hair, but something like people. It’s a true revelation to her. Another time she tells a story of a church committee and says that there were 3 African-American women and one white one - the race had nothing to do with the story, why did she need to include that?
I can accept a lot the ugly things she says are her playing a role, doing a ‘bit’, making herself out to be worse than she is but I think there is a real ugliness underneath a lot of it. She says she writes because she enjoys embodying other people, getting into her skin but a lot of her writing (including here) is about her, and a lot of her. There are too many instances where she seems to treat other people like props for it to seem like a coincidence.
Some of the writing advice is good, some of the life writing engaging but I found this book too ugly to be enjoyable.
