Dusk, Night, Dawn

Dusk, Night, Dawn Plot Summary

Introduction

On the morning of my sixty-fifth birthday, I woke up to the sound of rain tapping against my bedroom window. As I lay there, a familiar heaviness settled over me – that sense of uncertainty that seems to grow more profound with each passing year. The news headlines flashed through my mind: climate crisis, political division, a pandemic that had upended everything we once took for granted. My own personal worries joined the chorus – aging parents, adult children navigating a precarious world, and the question that haunted me most: how do we find hope when everything feels so uncertain? This universal struggle to maintain hope in difficult times is what Anne Lamott explores with extraordinary insight and characteristic humor. Through personal stories of her own stumbles, triumphs, and moments of profound realization, she offers a roadmap for finding our way through life's darkest passages. With unflinching honesty about her own fears and failings, she illuminates how we can cultivate courage and resilience even when everything seems to be falling apart. The journey she describes isn't about achieving perfection or finding easy answers – it's about embracing our human messiness, connecting with others in meaningful ways, and discovering that even in our most broken moments, there remains the possibility of revival, renewal, and unexpected joy.

Chapter 1: Authentic Souls: Embracing Imperfection in a Filtered World

I got sober in the darkest summer of my life, more than half my lifetime ago. The author describes waking up sick on a hot morning in her houseboat in Sausalito, with a view of gulls and Angel Island through her window. She wanted to die. Her first instinct was to have "a cool refreshing beer," but instead, she called a friend who came over and talked with her about alcoholism. Somehow, she hasn't had a drink since. While her body felt better after a week of sobriety, it took much longer for her soul to heal. She had to learn basic life skills – paying bills, taking care of her teeth, disposing of a shoebox of pills, and cleaning up the moral and financial wreckage of her past. The author tells us about a friend whose daughter accidentally killed a man while driving drunk on New Year's Eve. The woman, Ali, tried to run but was caught by a witness who recorded her license plate. Unlike the author, who once hit an animal while driving to a bar but didn't stop, Ali was caught, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison. She entered incarcerated life nearly catatonic, except when gripped by sheer terror. The author uses this story to teach her Sunday school students about the soul. "You've all had incredibly sad things happen," she tells them. "You've all had disappointments. Maybe you've shut down a little, or had to pretend you were just fine all the time. This can make our souls feel cloudy, like a streaky crystal ball." A child's hand shoots up, but only to ask about snacks. Still, she persists with her lesson. What would soul Windex look like? This is what she wants to discuss with the children. Who are we, and why aren't we being that person? Growing up, adults emphasized manners, achievements, appearance, obedience – but rarely mentioned soul. The concept was too unstructured, too uncontrollable, too "woo-woo." We got hijacked into socialization, conforming to rules set by parents, moving away from a more seamless participation in life. The soul, she explains, is like a lighthouse from which we see the vast celestial ocean, the purest expression of our being alive, "the one part they couldn't wreck." When the soul functions properly, it tugs on your pant leg to slow down, observes quietly, sometimes with mouth hanging open in fascination or outright bliss. Ali's soul began to heal in prison when she made a friend, attended AA meetings, and eventually discovered her purpose helping others. One day, while cleaning debris after floods as part of a prison work program, Ali found an abandoned baby coyote. When she showed it to her crew, the chief called her "Ali Baba," and the moment marked her transformation from convict D53789 to protector of wildlife and her own newborn sober self. This is the miracle of authentic soulwork – discovering that beneath the rubble of our worst mistakes and deepest shame, there remains an essential self worthy of being saved. The journey from isolation to connection, from self-loathing to self-acceptance, is the path toward wholeness that we all must travel, one imperfect step at a time.

Chapter 2: The Healing Power of Repentance and Forgiveness

I continue to wait patiently for several people to come to me begging for my forgiveness before they die—a change that is about as likely to happen for me as any breakthrough for the turkey in the old New Yorker cartoon marching with a placard that says "Repent!" The author reflects on waiting for forgiveness from one of her most damaging ex-boyfriends, her deceased parents, George W. Bush, and even herself. She pushes back against the bumper-sticker wisdom that we cannot forgive others until we forgive ourselves, recognizing the complexity and difficulty of self-forgiveness. The comedian Carmen Esposito's experience illustrates this challenge: "I remember a close friend's mom asking me if I really felt comfortable wearing a swimsuit next to her daughter's much more slender body. I was eight. When you are a little kid, you can't protect yourself from this shit. You think the shit is you." Those early wounds become trapped in our memory chambers, and even with years of recovery or therapy, the fear of our defective nature resurfaces like "chicken pox resurfaces as shingles." Yet there's grace in aging – we simply can't remember every old grievance. The author describes forgiveness as "not only a miracle, but a prize of redemption, as with books of S&H Green Stamps. But instead of a toaster, you get a unit of peace." Each act of forgiveness reveals more beauty around us and the friendly light inside that hasn't been faked or cheapened. She compares forgiveness to maturity – it's incremental, like traveling along the spiral chambers of a nautilus shell. To illustrate this concept, the author brought a nautilus shell to her Sunday school class. She explains that each chamber of the shell, starting from the inside of the spiral, is incrementally larger than the one before, until there's the outermost space where the mollusk lives. The chambers hold gas for buoyancy and propulsion. Like the nautilus, we have safe spaces within us, where we find relief from anxiety, room to breathe and contemplate. This nautilus metaphor extends to how forgiveness grows over time. The author shares the story of Esther, a woman she hurt deeply in her twenties by having an affair with her husband. After getting sober, she wrote to Esther expressing deep contrition. Esther responded immediately, saying that as a Jew, forgiveness was a mitzvah (a duty), and she had forgiven the author long before. She hoped the author could eventually forgive herself. Thirty years later, they reconnected at a writing workshop, and Esther gave her a gift – eighteen cents (a spiritual number in Judaism) bound with Scotch tape. Forgiveness doesn't follow a straight path but moves in "spirals, squiggles, and ink blots, looping back and over and around like a child's Möbius strip." The experience with Esther left the author longing to evolve toward deeper goodness with her remaining time. While she momentarily felt inspired to forgive everyone unconditionally, the urge faded by the time she got home. Instead, she carries Esther's tower of taped coins as a "dowsing rod, to suss out any breeze of forgiveness that is looking for a place to roost." In this way, she contributes to the aquifer that runs beneath our communities, the groundwater that restores and sustains life.

Chapter 3: Faith in Small Doses: Finding Courage During Exhaustion

My best friends are exhausted, furious, and afraid. It is not a charming combination. The author observes that her friends are worn out – partly from aging, partly from the "enervating nature of these cruel times." Their adrenaline spikes frequently as they sit beside friends with scary diagnoses or at memorial services, all while glaciers calve huge chunks on their screens and their short-term memories dissolve. They had hope in special investigations, oncologists, clinical trials, young climate activists, and their grown children straightening out – yet things seem more dire, and friends more manic, drained, and stuck. A friend named Terri Tate crystallized this feeling at church one day. Looking bleary and clenched while collecting programs to recycle, she confessed: "I have made a life and career of being a good sport. And I am worn out." The author empathizes, sick of being "such a good sport and worker bee, chin up and adorably ironic" while everything worsens. Her friends have dark conversations about democracy ending and climate catastrophe, their voices trailing off. One friend's party devolved into talk about suicide methods until the host's wife started crying. Terri requested "a lively story of burnout and hope." So the author shared the biblical story of Elijah from her Sunday school lesson. Elijah's situation was dire: Israel was deeply divided between followers of the God of Abraham and those worshipping Baal. The king, Ahab, was "insane, cruel, and narcissistic," and his queen Jezebel had threatened to kill Elijah. Severely depressed, Elijah lay under a broom brush in the wilderness and prayed that he might die, saying, "I have had enough." This, the author notes, is what people in recovery call Step One – admitting you've crashed and burned, run out of good ideas. Then Elijah slept. This existential exhaustion surrounds us today – from those in "lifelong forward thrust" focused on meaningless goals to people facing slow-motion tragedies. The author asks a friend whose twenty-two-year-old son has incurable brain cancer how she sustains optimism. "I just can't give up," her friend answers, "and under the fear and terror there's something that won't let me." She adds: "I live with a level of mess, of what I can't control, of what I don't think I can bear. Yet I love my life." She describes what the author calls "lunch-money faith: nothing dramatic, and just enough." The author shares how, weeks after her wedding, she had a vision while alone in a hotel room on Maui. Instead of a beautiful honeymoon vision, she saw herself swimming past the waves toward the horizon, beyond her ability to return – she was just so tired. She did what she knew to do: told the truth to her husband and cried. He listened without trying to fix her or cheer her up, and they went to the buffet and overate together. In Elijah's story, an angel wakes him with hearth cake to eat. "I love this so much," the author writes. The cake wasn't fancy – just plain fried bread, "bread for the journey, nourishment to get Elijah to where he needed to be." Eventually, Elijah reaches Mount Sinai, where he meets God not in dramatic ways but in a "still, small voice." This reminds us of the importance of contemplation, quietness, and listening. When facing exhaustion, sometimes the most healing acts are the simplest: sleep, nourishment, and the courage to admit we're not okay. Faith in small doses – the lunch-money kind – may be exactly what sustains us through our most depleted moments, reminding us that even in our weariness, we are not alone.

Chapter 4: Climate Anxiety and the Art of Not Giving Up

I have a doctorate in morbid reflection, and a grave anxiety disorder, which is not ideal for our times as we join hands to turn climate change around. The author acknowledges that the younger generation might prefer older people to step aside after "the mess we've made," but argues that her generation still has much to contribute. They know how to write grants, draft laws, organize grassroots movements, and they remember all the words to the protest songs. They're sorry about handing off an earth in crisis, but they've amassed invaluable climate and energy data for the young to build upon. Her husband Neal offers a perspective she finds challenging: the minimal organizing principle. He believes that because the world keeps reorganizing itself, generation after generation, after Hitler and the Iron Curtain and custody battles, we can trust that it will continue picking itself and us up. She sometimes tries to badger him into defending this theory in light of climate change, insisting they must stop traveling or get Teslas, but they can't afford Teslas and he likes their old cars. Despite fossil fuels destroying the world, she acknowledges the freedom and intimacy cars have provided since she first got her learner's permit fifty years ago. The author describes how she met Neal in 2016, and how they might not have had a second date without her car. During their first meeting, when she had to drive across the county for an errand, he asked to come along. They spent hours jamming to the Beatles, laughing, and sneaking glances at each other. In a car, she observes, "you're taking turns sharing the podcasts of your life," seeing beauty pass outside while being protected from the scary aspects of the world. "But horribly, at some point, you have to get out of the car." One summer night, they attended a storytelling event featuring one of her friends. When she discovered her friend would perform last in the second half after an intermission, panic rose within her – an "ancient archaeological anxiety" she remembered from childhood. The hostess took fourteen minutes for her introduction, promising six storytellers with fifteen-minute time limits each, plus audience participation during intermission. The author's anxiety intensified; she whispered to Neal, "She is everything I hate about life." As the performances dragged on, each storyteller exceeding their time limit, her distress escalated. She began tapping – a form of psychological acupuncture used to relieve anxiety – while trying to appear normal. She whispered to Neal that she felt like she was having a breakdown, but insisted she would be okay. During intermission, she met a woman celebrating ten years of sobriety who, noticing her tapping, revealed she was an acupuncturist who taught this technique to clients. The woman gently tapped the webbing between the author's fingers, bringing her back to her body and helping her return to the theater for another hour of performances. When her friend finally appeared onstage, the author was transported by the story of a first teenage kiss at the Berkeley Botanical Garden, recalling "those lovely acres that hold every California plant and terrain, bluebells and redwoods and cacti, colors and flavors and shapes from everywhere, diverse as Oakland." On the drive home, she and Neal sang along to the Beatles, with no hint of her earlier panic. Through this personal story of anxiety and recovery, the author offers a message to younger people fearful about the future: older people have fears too, but they've seen life "self-correct again and again." She promises that "science and love almost always win the day," and reassures them that her generation will march alongside them, "mad and afraid," helping "cause a holy commotion" while singing together for change.

Chapter 5: Shadows and Light: Power Outages as Spiritual Metaphors

Pacific Gas and Electric is a privately owned utility whose outdated equipment starts catastrophic fires in California's forests. Once it has started a fire, PG&E turns off power to prevent the fire from spreading. The author describes how, with a fire two counties away and forecasters predicting a "historic wind event," her community sprang into action. Some bought generators, others stocked up on firewood, non-perishable food, and batteries. Everyone rose to the occasion, supporting each other on the first day of the outage. The author and her husband Neal took their best space heater to an invalid with a small generator and invited their friend Maya to stay in their spare room. Maya, twenty years younger than them, lived "in the boonies" and had recently separated from an older, unfaithful, and "boring" partner named Erik. They helped her settle in without adding to her negative narrative about her ex. Early on the first day, they discovered "the great lesson of life, which is how much actually does work all the time: candles, water, soap, pets, walking, friends. And gas!" They had hot water and indoor plumbing, which the author calls "the beginning and end of all civilization." While Wi-Fi and sometimes phone service were unavailable, they could use lamps and the microwave with their generator, though it "sounded like a jet engine" and some neighbors without generators seemed "distant and maybe bitter." The author took walks, brought an orchid to a dying relative, a rose to a friend with cancer, and pumpkins to a shut-in mother. At intersections where traffic lights were out, everyone practiced "You go, I go," waving hello to each other. "Sometimes the movement of grace looks like letting other people go first," she observes. Maya spent the day visiting a girlfriend, crying over phone calls with Erik, and staying in her room. On Sunday, the author tried to convince Neal and Maya to attend church with her, but Neal needed to tend his garden and Maya claimed to have a deadline. The church service was "infinitely and beautifully primitive" by candlelight, reminding the author of Aboriginal ceremonies where people connect deeply to earth, vibrations, and ancestors. The interim pastor's sermon, however, seemed directed at the author's judgment of Erik: "How can we live in faithfulness and freedom when we're in judgment?" The message was clear – focusing on what others are doing wrong robs us of freedom, awareness, and life's sweetness. By the third day, when the "historic wind event" was in full force, Neal and the author walked their dogs together. An argument about suffering arose – Neal believes suffering is always "a blessing and a portal," while she finds his view "elitist." When she shut down the conversation, she "secretly shut [her] heart to him completely," before realizing that her "bodyguard" (her defensive self) was protecting others from her honest thoughts while also protecting her from seeing "how damaged my mind is, how terrified and angry and shut down." On the fourth and final day of the power outage, the author woke with "a fleeting sense of connection" to everything she'd experienced – "the cold and warmth, the roots and the sky, the view from above and the peanut butter saltines." When the lights finally came back on, she and Neal celebrated "the miracle of having the luxury of turning off the lights," resting in darkness that was soothing because they knew it wouldn't last forever. Through this power outage story, the author reveals how disruptions to our normal routines can illuminate what truly matters. In the contrast between light and shadow, connection and isolation, judgment and acceptance, we discover that our most difficult moments often contain unexpected gifts of insight, if only we're willing to see them.

Chapter 6: The Vulnerability of Being Truly Seen in Relationships

I have a friend whose daughter accidentally killed a man a few years ago, and then tried to run. The author returns to the story of Ali, who was driving drunk on New Year's Eve and hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk. The author confesses she could have easily done the same – she once hit what might have been a dog, cat, or raccoon while driving to a bar forty years ago, but lacked the courage to stop. Ali was caught because a witness recorded her license plate. The author describes the road where her accident occurred – "curvy, above the beach, lined with eucalyptus and nasturtiums, a constant interplay of light and shade, and teasing glimpses of the ocean." There was a monarch butterfly grove nearby, with "veils of black, orange, and white clutching the trunks of trees." In recent years, drought and climate shifts have caused the butterflies to stop landing there during migration. Ali lived near a famous monarch grove in Huntington Beach with her mother. Everyone liked her, but she was always finding fault with herself – her creative efforts, studies, body – and had become directionless since dropping out of college. After the accident, she was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. The author describes her as "a short, slight woman in her thirties, with dimples," who was "nearly catatonic when she entered prison, except when she was in sheer terror." The author tells her Sunday school students about Ali because "the prison restored her soul." She explains to the children: "You've all had incredibly sad things happen. You've all had disappointments. Maybe you've shut down a little, or had to pretend you were just fine all the time. This can make our souls feel cloudy, like a streaky crystal ball." She asks them how their own souls might be cleansed, comparing it to "soul Windex." In prison, Ali made a friend, a lifer in the same cell block who had gotten sober while incarcerated. This friend took her to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where Ali initially insisted she was "not actually an alcoholic, just a social drinker with bad luck." The author relates to this denial, having felt the same way herself. When Ali shared this belief with her mother during a visit, her mother responded with remarkable restraint, simply saying, "Huh." Ali kept attending meetings because they got her out of her cell and the women hugged and laughed. Though still depressed by what she had done and how it had damaged both the victim's family and her own, something changed the day she admitted she might be an alcoholic. "When she said who she was, or might actually be, something flared: the pilot light, a watch fire." Though still surrounded by the terrible smells and sounds of prison, "a switch had gone on. She looked up, away from the grime of her floor and plastic prison slippers, to the window." Eventually, Ali joined a conservation work program, earning a few dollars weekly. While cleaning up debris after floods, she found a baby coyote in some brush. When she showed it to the crew, the chief exclaimed, "Look what Ali Baba found!" and arranged for a wildlife rescue organization to take the animal. The author asks her students how it's possible "to go from being convict D53789 to Ali Baba, from maximum shame and cowardice to protector of baby coyotes and her newborn sober self, both worthy to be saved?" The answer: "Something had to have opened." Through Ali's transformation, we see how being truly seen – by ourselves, by others who understand our struggles, and by the divine – creates the space for healing. When we can finally acknowledge our true selves, with all our flaws and failures, we open the door to the redemption that waits patiently on the other side of our shame.

Chapter 7: One-Winged Love: Finding Beauty in Imperfect Connections

The search for the holy grail has been called off. No grail to find, no code to break. All along, it turns out that there was only the imperfect love of a few trusted people and that in troubled times, like heat waves, epidemics, and blackouts, most people bring their best selves. The author begins with this wry acceptance of life's anticlimactic nature – not ultimate answers, but "the blessings of friendship and service; silence and music, the beauty of the seasons and skies." She sarcastically adds, "This is so disappointing." She reflects on the fairy tales her parents read to her as a child – Japanese stories from her father, raised in Tokyo, and Brothers Grimm tales from her mother. Rather than identifying with beautiful princesses, she saw herself in "the youngest prince in 'The Six Swans,' the oddity, the one who is not wholly saved from the spell and ends up with one arm and one wing." This image of being "weird, beautiful, hobbled, beloved" captures her essence. The author describes her parents' difficult backgrounds – her father was the son of a missionary in Tokyo, her mother the daughter of a Liverpool dockworker. Both were raised by grief-stricken mothers; her paternal grandmother lost a three-year-old daughter to the 1918 flu pandemic, while her maternal grandmother was widowed with twin girls whom she brought to America as nine-year-olds. Her father fought in World War II against Japanese men he might have grown up with. Her parents "were wired for survival and making good impressions," trying to create a home together that "was impressive from the outside. Inside? Not so much." She wonders how she and her brothers learned love from such "wired scarcity." They found it in their parents' siblings and friends who showed interest in them, in friends' parents who welcomed them, in teachers whose admiration gave them hope, and in stories. Particularly meaningful was "The Six Swans," in which a witch turns six princes into swans, and their sister must sew nettle shirts in complete silence for six years to break the spell. While they didn't have an evil stepmother, the author says they had "a rough equivalent, which was my father's mistresses." His affairs cast a spell over the children, transforming them "not into swans. More like penguins or ostriches, or hummingbirds, who can fly but can't walk." Despite this pain, she acknowledges her father's gifts – particularly hiking. "We scurried along behind him on our short legs through cathedrals of redwood groves, like a cross between ducklings and the Seven Dwarfs." She treasures two artifacts her parents left behind – a small ivory elephant from her father's childhood in India and a corn-husk angel Christmas tree topper her mother brought from Hawaii. The elephant represents wisdom and gentleness, while the angel, with "a rattled fabric face, smeared lipstick, and incongruously misplaced glitter," embodies her mother's complicated nature – "scratchy, lovely and voodoo at the same time." Returning to the fairy tale, she describes how the sister in "The Six Swans" completes five shirts but runs out of time for the sixth. When she throws the incomplete shirts over her swan brothers, they transform back to humans – except the youngest brother, who retains one wing where his arm should be. "You'll never be able to fly with one arm and one wing, unbalanced and earthbound," the author writes. "But a wing is soft, feathery, warm, and strong over thin bird bones. You could wrap this wing around yourself if it was freezing or if the sun was too hot." This imperfect transformation becomes her metaphor for love itself – flawed but beautiful, protective yet vulnerable. "Love is the gas station and the fuel, the air and the water," she writes. "Love will get in. It will wear you down." Despite her parents' limitations, they seeded something deep within her – the knowledge that "love trumps all, trumps evil, hate, and death. It makes us real, as life slowly sews us our human shirts." This understanding of love's transformative power, even in its most imperfect forms, becomes the foundation for finding hope in life's continuing uncertainty.

Summary

Anne Lamott's journey through darkness into dawn offers a luminous roadmap for anyone struggling with uncertainty, fear, or despair. Through stories of recovering alcoholics finding community, a young woman rebuilding her life after tragedy, exhausted friends sustaining each other through illness, and her own journey through anxiety and relationship challenges, she illuminates how light persistently breaks through our darkest moments. Her narrative reminds us that transformation rarely follows a straight line – it spirals like a nautilus shell, growing incrementally through countless small acts of courage, forgiveness, and connection. The wisdom that emerges is both profound and practical: We discover hope not in grand revelations but in "lunch-money faith" – just enough to get through today. We heal not through perfection but through honesty about our "one-winged" nature, embracing our incompleteness as the very quality that makes us human. And we find meaning not in certainty but in showing up for each other when the power goes out, when the diagnosis comes, when the earth itself seems threatened. Like the ivory elephant and corn-husk angel the author treasures, the things that save us are often humble, imperfect, and imbued with both beauty and flaws – much like ourselves. In a world that often feels broken beyond repair, Lamott offers the radical hope that our cracks are precisely "how the light gets in," and that together, with love as our compass, we can navigate even the most uncertain futures.

About Author

Loading...

Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott is an author of several novels and works of non-fiction. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, her non-fiction works are largely autobiographical, with strong doses of self-deprecating humor and covering such subjects as alcoholism, single motherhood, and Christianity. She appeals to her fans because of her sense of humor, her deeply felt insights, and her outspoken views on topics such as her left-of-center politics and her unconventional Christian faith. She is a graduate of Drew College Preparatory School in San Francisco, California. Her father, Kenneth Lamott, was also a writer and was the basis of her first novel Hard Laughter.Lamott's life is documented in Freida Lee Mock's 1999 documentary Bird by Bird: A Film Portrait of Writer Anne Lamott.

Read more

Related Books by Anne Lamott

Loading...

Bird by Bird

Anne Lamott

Some Instructions on Writing and Life

★★★★☆4.2

Loading...

Hallelujah Anyway

Anne Lamott

Rediscovering Mercy

★★★½☆3.7

Loading...

Stitches

Anne Lamott

A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

★★★½☆3.9

Loading...

Somehow

Anne Lamott

Thoughts on Love

★★★½☆3.9