A few years ago a friend recommended this book. I fell in love with the writing of Anne Lamott. Somehow the complicated business of being messed up and finding faith, a faith in Jesus, seems fresh, vibrant and approachable through her honest voice and wry self-loathing. How does she do that? ( )

Some interesting thoughts and ideas in here, but they are usually buried in her relentless attempts at humor. I know a lot of people find her hilarious, but I just felt exhausted by her jokes. ( )

I read Traveling Mercies, chapter-by-chapter, with my mom. We have both been dealing with different forms of grief, and have found this book to be so helpful. We always had much to talk about and have learned so much about each other over the last few months. Even if you don’t agree with Lamott’s views on faith, this book is highly recommended - especially to read with a partner. ( )

I enjoyed this quirky, well-written account of the author's forays into faith. Told in a semi-autobiographical style, in conversational tone, starting with her free-range childhood in California.

Fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals would probably object to some of the author's lifestyle, past and present, and her fairly liberal, relaxed theology. But I thought her ideas were interesting, I appreciated her extreme honesty, and found some of her insecurities and observations poignant.

Recommended.

Longer review here: https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/2023/03/traveling-mercies-by-anne-lamott.ht... ( )

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace--only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Traveling Mercies is a collection of autobiographical essays by Anne Lamott in which she explores her life without God, her road to faith, and her continuing struggle to live a life worthy of the beliefs she holds. It is not the story of her life, there are uncovered gaps that we know are there, but it is the story of her soul, and that, I would argue, is more important.

With a little touch of Erma Bombeck, and an ability to look at the ugly and petty, along with the sublime of her life, she achieves a lot in terms of inspiring without resorting to even a moment of preaching. I love her descriptions of the people she has met along her journey: her best friend, Pammy, the elderly black church member, Mary Williams, who gives her bags of dimes to help her through her broke (and sometimes broken) days; her father, whose death devastated her life, and her son, Sam, who colors it.

Some of her words seem written just for me. I lost my father and mother two months apart in 1994 and all these years later I feel the homesickness for them in ways I cannot convey to anyone:

Twenty years ago. For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

I believe she has tapped the code to grief, a kind of spector that comes and goes in your life, but never entirely dies away:

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it."

and,

Sometimes grief looks like narcolepsy.

But, lest you think this is a book about death or grief, I will share the following except, which will prove that this is just a book about insight, humanity, and grace.

I can't imagine anything but music that could have brought about this alchemy. Maybe it's because music is about as physical as it gets; your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.

( )