“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said. ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'”
Anne Lamott, author of several novels, writer of columns and reviews, and a writing teacher, shares her offbeat wisdom in this book whose title is a nod to her writer father, who once told Lamott’s brother, paralyzed with writer’s block on the eve of a deadline for a science report, to take it “bird by bird.”
If you have ever wondered what it takes and means to be a writer and what the contents of your school lunches said about what your parents were really like, this book is for you. From faith, love, and grace to pain, jealousy, and fear, Lamott insists that you keep your eyes open, and then shows you how to survive. And always, from the life of the artist she turns to the art of life.