Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

Jun 1, 2015 | Books

[title subtitle=”review: Marla Cantrellr”][/title]

Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace is a collection of twenty-four essays on love and loss and forgiveness, written by one of the most thought-provoking authors of our time. Anne Lamott, now sixty-one, draws examples from her own relationships to show us how to see extraordinary moments that often go unnoticed in our rushed and worried world.

What makes this book exceptional is how honest Lamott is about her battle to overcome both deep hurts and petty annoyances. She is irreverent at times, throwing in a swear word or two. In places, she is laugh-out-loud funny. And she is consistently insightful.

In her past is the alcoholism and drug use that almost did her in, the early years of single motherhood when she gathered a group of friends to create a stable support system for her only son, and her rocky start in a dysfunctional family.

When Lamott talks about the hard road to forgiveness, she says the things we might be afraid to say, such as admitting her anger at her long-dead father. She talks about how thrilled she was to be given a journal of his, one she’d never seen, that he’d written the year he was diagnosed with brain cancer when he was in his fifties. In his writing she finds snippets about herself that aren’t flattering, and the passages crush her. She tells the story to her friends, her therapist, but nothing makes it any better.

Lamott, with her sharp sense of humor, writes. “A lack of forgiveness is like leprosy of the insides and left untreated, it can take out tissue, equilibrium, soul, sense of self. I have sometimes considered writing a book called All the People I Still Hate: A Christian Perspective, but readers would recoil. Also, getting older means that without meaning to, you accidentally forgive almost everyone — almost — so the book would not be long.”

It is in her confessions that we see that the things we struggle with are universal, from anger to sorrow to jealousy. And along the way Lamott lets us step into her life. “I learned early in sobriety that there were two points of view about me — how my close friends saw me, and how I saw myself. I figured it was obvious I was a fraud, and kind of disgusting. My friends thought I was irresistible, profoundly worthy of trust. I thought at first that one view must be wrong, and I made the most radical decision, for the time being, to believe my friends.”

When Lamott talks about her writing, she says she has a lot of hope and a lot of faith and she struggles to communicate that. It may be hard for her to get the words just right, to get the stories to flow across the pages, but when she does they’re brilliant. No one else seems to be able to whittle down the human experience into such perfectly crafted stories that touch our hearts and make our worlds a whole lot brighter.

Do South Magazine

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