Almost Everything

From Anne Lamott, bestselling author of Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Help,Thanks, Wow, comes a new book about the place hope has in our lives."I am stockpiling antibiotics for the Apocalypse, even as I await the blossomingof paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen," Anne Lamott admits at thebeginning of Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. Despair and uncertainty surroundus: in the headlines, in our families, and in ourselves. But even when life is at itsbleakest--when everything makes us feel, as Lamott puts it, "doomed, stunned,exhausted, and over-caffeinated"--the seeds of rejuvenation are at hand. "Alltruth is paradox," Lamott writes, "and this turns out to be a reason for hope. If youarrive at a place in life that is miserable, it will change." That is the time when wemust pledge, she says, "not to give up, but to do what Wendell Berry wrote: 'Bejoyful, though you have considered all the facts.'"