Help, Thanks, Wow (Lamott)

Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers
Anne Lamott, 2012
Penguin Group (USA)
112 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594631290


Summary
New York Times-bestselling author Anne Lamott writes about the three simple prayers essential to coming through tough times, difficult days and the hardships of daily life.

Readers of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott’s funny and perceptive writing about her own faith through decades of trial and error. And in her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she knows about prayer to these fundamentals.

It is these three prayers—asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating what we have that is good, and feeling awe at the world around us—that can get us through the day and can show us the way forward. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott recounts how she came to these insights, explains what they mean to her and how they have helped, and explores how others have embraced these same ideas.

Insightful and honest as only Anne Lamott can be, Help, Thanks, Wow is the everyday faith book that new Lamott readers will love and longtime Lamott fans will treasure. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1954
• WhereSan Francisco, California, USA
• Education—Goucher College (Maryland)
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellow
• Currently—lives in Northern California

Anne Lamott's recovery from alcoholism and drug abuse helped her career in two ways. First, it marked an artistic rebound for the novelist; second, she's become an inspirational figure to fans who have read her frank, funny nonfiction books covering topics from motherhood to religion to, yes, fighting for sobriety.

Early on, Lamott's hard-luck novels were impressive chronicles of family strife punctuated by bad (but often entertaining) behavior. Everyone in Lamott's books is sort of screwed up, but she stocks them with a humor and core decency that make them hard to resist. In Hard Laughter, she tells the (semi-autobiographical) story of a dysfunctional family rocked by the father's brain tumor diagnosis. In Rosie and its 1997 sequel, Crooked Little Heart, the heroines are a sassy teenage girl and her alcoholic, widowed mom. Another precocious child provides the point of view in All New People, in which a girl rides out the waves of the 1960s with her nutty parents.

Lamott's conversational, direct style and cynical humor have always been strengths, and with All New People—the first book she wrote after getting sober—she turned a corner. Reedeming herself from the disastrous reviews of her messy (too much so, even for the endearingly messy Lamott) 1985 third novel Joe Jones, Lamott's talent came back into focus. "Anne Lamott is a cause for celebrations," the New Yorker effused. "[Her] real genius lies in capturing the ineffable, describing not perfect moments, but imperfect ones...perfectly. She is nothing short of miraculous."

That said, Lamott's sensibility is not for everyone. The faith, both human and spiritual, in her books is accompanied by her unsparing irony and a distinct disregard for wholesomeness or conventionality; and God here is for sinners as much as (if not more than) for saints. Her girls are often not girls but half-adults; her adults, vice-versa. She finds the adolescent, weak spots in all her characters, making them people to root for at the same time.

Among Lamott's most messy, troubled characters is the author herself, and she began turning this to her advantage with the 1993 memoir Operating Instructions, a single mom's meditation on the big experiment—failures included—of new parenthood. It was also in this book that Lamott "came out of the closet" with her Christianity, and earned a whole new following that grew with her subsequent memoirs, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life and Traveling Mercies. However gifted Lamott was at conveying fictional stories, it was in telling her own stories that her self-deprecating humor and hard-earned wisdom really made themselves known, and loved by readers.

Extras
• Lamott's Joe Jones, which is now out of print, was so poorly received that it sent the alcoholic Lamott into a tailspin. "When Joe Jones came out I really got trashed," she told the New York Times in 1997. "I got 27 bad reviews. It was kind of exhilarating in its way. I was still drinking and I woke up every morning feeling so sick, I literally felt I was pinned to the bed by centrifugal force. I wouldn't have very many memories of what had happened the night before. I'd have to call around, and I could tell by people's reaction whether I'd pulled it off or not. I was really humiliating myself. It was bad."

• Lamott's father was a writer who instilled the belief in her that it was a privilege in life to be an artist, as opposed to having a regular job. But she stresses to students that it doesn't happen overnight; that the work has to be measured in small steps, with continual efforts to improve. She said in an NPR interivew, "I've published six books and I still worry that the phone is going to ring and [someone] is going to say, 'Okay, the jig is up, you have to get a job..."'

• In an essay accompanying Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, Lamott described her decision to begin writing in earnest about Christianity:

Thirteen years ago, I first lurched—very hung over—into a little church in one of the poorest communities in California. Without this church, I do not think I would have survived the last few years of my drinking. But even so, I had written about the people there only in passing. I did, however, speak about the church whenever I could, sheepishly shoehorning in a story or two. But it wasn't really until my fifth book [Operating Instructions] that I came out of the closet as a real believer.... I started to realize that there was a great hunger and thirst for regular, cynical, ragbag people to talk about God...." (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Filled with Lamott's unique brand of humor, wisdom and profound spiritual insight… She has a gift for putting into words what it means to accept and ultimately embrace the beauty, mystery, and pain that is life.
San Antonio Express-News

[A] prayer manual for people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading prayer manuals. As such it may surprise, a bit, some of Lamott’s most secular readers. But it takes a very familiar voice in a newish direction, and may attract younger readers whose religious preference is more offbeat than orthodox. It reads like it needed longer gestation or one more rewrite to go from casual-casual to casual-polished, but anybody who gets it as a holiday gift will likely just say, “Thanks. Wow.”
Publishers Weekly


An imaginative do-it-yourself approach to spirituality…. With a stand-up comic’s snap and pop, candid and righteous Lamott tells hilarious and wrenching tales about various predicaments that have sparked her prayers and inspired her to encourage others to pray anytime, anywhere, and any way.
Booklist


A refreshingly simple approach to spiritual practice in a pint-sized reflection on prayer.... In what at first may seem like a jumbled mashup of stories and reflections, Lamott manages to deftly convey the idea that in trying to control things, we've largely lost our ability to see the good and the miraculous in everyday life. And those commodities go a long way, she writes, in terms of making a Divine connection that brings a measure of hope and peace. Though fans may be dismayed at the brevity of the book, there's more here than meets the eye.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Help, Thanks, Wow:

1. Do you consider Help, Thanks, Wow a helpful guide to prayer? Did you pray (at all? regularly?) before you read Lamott's book? Has the book changed your attitude toward prayer or altered your practice of prayer?

2. What is prayer and what is its purpose? What does Lamott suggest prayer is? What do you pray for?

3. Why does Lamott believe that powerlessness is a spiritual condition? Have you ever felt overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness in your life?

4. Is this a religious book? A spiritual book? Does it clash with or conform to your beliefs?

5. Comment on Anne Lamott's belief in gratitude:

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always make you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means that you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.

Is practicing gratitude easy for you personally? When life is difficult, how does Lamott think we find gratitude, and why is it important? Are there times when you feel it's impossible to be grateful?

6. Do you find Lamott's irreverence toward God disturbing or refreshing? She refers to God sometimes as "She," and feels that God shouldn't mind when we say we're angry at Him/Her because things aren't going well for us.

7. What does Lamott mean when she quotes C.S. Lewis's line that says, [prayer] "doesn't change God. It changes me." Do you agree or disagree?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, on line or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)