Will I love Traveling Mercies?

I am a secular Jew and Anne Lamott is a church-going Christian, but I feel she is my soulmate.

She is so honest, and vulnerable, and hysterically funny that reading her work feels like listening to a good friend sharing her innermost thoughts. I gave this book to someone whose mother was dying, and she claimed that reading it helped get through that dark period.

I would love to have that kind of power as a writer: the power to change people’s lives for the better. I have secretly always wanted to run the world. After all, I couldn’t do… show more.

Most people, I think, obsess over the desire to please their parents. Too often, it simply isn’t possible to gain their approval or their love, however hard we try. It was like this with my stepfather. Although Traveling Mercies is a rich, multi-themed book, what pulled me in was her relationship to her parents, particularly her father. Lamott tries to convince herself that her family could survive their alcoholism and infidelities. She writes of longing for her family to be “…OK and that we were safe, and that my daddy wasn’t going to leave us, and that one day I… show more.