Somehow

Somehow Plot Summary

Introduction

The back door creaked in the tiny house where I was conceived. Only inches thick, yet what a complex barrier a door creates in your life. For some, doors represent fear and isolation—the slam that says "stay out"; for others, they symbolize sanctuary and possibility—the portal to freedom, connection, and sometimes even grace. I remember standing at a red door with an arch at its top, trying to work up courage. Inside waited a nightmare: thirty or forty sober alcoholics under fluorescent lights. But I had run out of any more good ideas, so I stepped through. That single moment changed everything. This book invites us to examine the unexpected doors love opens in our lives, often when we least expect it. Through deeply personal stories, Anne Lamott explores how love shelters us during our darkest moments—not with perfect protection, but with the gentle resilience we need to keep going. She doesn't offer false comfort or greeting-card platitudes about love conquering all. Instead, she shares raw, often humorous accounts of stumbling through life's messiest challenges: addiction, failure, loss, shame, and the maddening complexities of family. Through it all emerges a profound truth: that love is not a flawless shield, but a patchwork shelter that holds us together even when the walls seem to crumble.

Chapter 1: Finding Sacred Swag: Gifts of Unexpected Generosity

Hell in a handbasket was the good old days, back when smog and Nixon were the emergencies. Today, with school shootings and climate disasters, I find myself wondering what wisdom I can possibly leave my son and grandson. What has consistently worked to lift us during the inevitable times of darkness? There's a story I've been telling my Sunday school kids for thirty years, which they never tire of hearing. A young girl is having trouble falling asleep and calls out for her mother. Her mother comes in, tucks her in, and assures her that Jesus is there in the room with her, so she needn't be afraid. This goes on repeatedly until finally, in the dark, the little girl says plaintively, "I need someone with skin on." This is the main instruction I would leave my family: be goodness with skin on. We are called to be the love that wears socks and shoes. My church once came up with a beautiful way to embody this. Our pastor and deacons created lavender bags filled with supplies for the unsheltered in our county—shampoo, socks, dental floss, even a porkpie hat that could serve as a kind of shelter on rainy days. My lifelong cross to bear has been secret derisive judgment, so I swallowed my sense that this was ridiculous and took three bags to distribute. One day, I approached a scruffy man sitting on a bench. "Hi, I'm Annie!" I said cheerfully. "I have something for you." He looked anxious as I sat down and started explaining each item—toothpaste, toothbrush, floss. "Teeth are an incredible problem, aren't they?" I babbled nervously. He gave me the side-eye but didn't leave. Eventually he lunged for the bag, took only the socks, and handed it back. "That's all I need," he mumbled before walking away. On another occasion, I encountered a woman with gray dreadlocks. I explained the bag contained things she might find useful. "Here are the antibacterial hand wipes, for instance," I said. "Everywhere you turn in this world, there's funk." Not knowing what else to say, I pointed out they were fragrance-free. We sat in silence until she took the porkpie hat, saying she could give it to someone named Mick. It's all grassroots, these actions to help another person. We are the ones we've been waiting for. No one is going to come save us from our deepest fears. This is so incredibly disappointing. But I grieve and feel panicky sometimes about my grandchild's future in the face of climate catastrophe. At the same time, deep in my heart, I do believe. There is a common saying in popular South American songs: "You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming." We get people water. There are many kinds. Looking strangers in the eye is water. Being present for those who suffer is water. And in this giving, we discover something unexpected—the very thing we've been searching for all along: a reason to believe that together, somehow, we'll find our way through.

Chapter 2: Shelters of Imperfection: When Walls Crumble and Hearts Open

Pink-sherbet camellias blossomed on an otherwise drab, bleak midwinter morning not so long ago. I was sitting on the couch with Tim, an old friend from my early sobriety. He and his wife had been there for me during many hard times, and now he was asking for more intensive mentoring to find freedom from what he called the bondage of self. He was about to turn fifty-five and craved a reset, freedom from the same ten worries, the same disappointments in himself, the obsession with the bathroom scale. He read me a list of people he was angry at or jealous of. When he got to the last person, his close friend Emma, something in my brain short-circuited. Without thinking, I went after Emma—specifically, how secretly jealous I thought she was of his long and happy marriage. I even made fun of her fancy new snakeskin purse. We both laughed at my cheerful malice. A few hours later, Tim called. His voice was tight and stricken. He said he was sorry, but he didn't want me to be his mentor anymore. "Listening to the cruel way you talked about Emma, I realized I don't want to turn out like you. You were so two-faced and mean." I was struck by lightning, an electrical storm of shame. I apologized profusely, but he ended the conversation quickly. I was shattered. I texted my girlfriend Janine, who called back immediately. I told her what Tim had said and suggested I text him begging for forgiveness. "Maybe not today," she said, and asked if we could pray. My terror default from childhood was that critical people were right about my faults. Tim had triggered the most universal fear: that once you really know us, we are not lovable. Neal, my husband, was tender with me when I told him what happened. He reminded me that I have an inner critic whose job is to keep me small and worried: Tim currently held its mic. The next morning I woke up anxious and depressed. I texted Janine again: "Now can I text Tim and beg him to forgive me?" "Maybe not today," she wrote back. I wandered outside. The camellias seemed to be mocking me with their playfulness. I put a bit of paper with Tim's initial on it in a tiny box where I give things to God when my own best thinking is making everything worse. I said, "You think you're so big? Here, have a go at it." Usually grace in its guise as spiritual WD-40 gets in and loosens tight knots, but not today. Several days later, just when I was beginning to accept the loss, Tim texted me, pouring out his heart. He was so sorry for going off on me. He had been wrong, had taken out his unhappiness with Emma and work on me. He asked my forgiveness. And then—God is my witness—he said, "Be my guest" when I promised never to mention Emma again. "You won't believe what she said to Cory last night. So thoughtless..." All I could do was hang my head and smile. I looked up at the camellias, fellow travelers, dying, shedding, blooming. Their leaves are so glossy that they look laminated, as if they could withstand anything, even wolf attack, as if they are saying to the flowers and the buds: We will protect you. Just grow. Be. Whatever.

Chapter 3: On Minus Tides: Witnessing Life's Retreats and Returns

Sometimes it all just sucks, as Jesus says somewhere in the Gospels (although off the top of my head I can't recall chapter and verse). Life becomes a lava lamp of memories of happier and sadder times, accompanied by the burbling sound of advancing time, of which one friend has almost run out, and of which I will too someday. It's a ten-minute walk to where my friendship with Karen Carlson took off, twenty-six years ago at the trailhead in Deer Park. She used to lead a group of us up and down the wooded trails, alternately jogging and walking fast. She called it "scampering" and inducted us into the International Order of the Squirrel. Now Karen can hardly breathe, diagnosed with hypersensitivity pneumonitis and having undergone a harrowing double lung transplant. I asked her five years ago when the disease was first detected how this could possibly have happened. She said, "This happens to people, and I am a person." My response was to itemize truly detestable people who it should have happened to if life made sense. Her courage over years of sometimes unbelievable suffering was heroic. But right after attending a series of extreme minus tides last summer, her body went into a sudden and precipitous decline. I've come to see her as an extreme minus tide, the kind I grew up seeing every year as a child playing in West Marin tide pools, when the ocean has rolled way back toward the horizon. Huge craggy rock formations, usually submerged under the chilly Pacific Ocean, are revealed during these tides. Some are long like crocodile snouts, some tall as dinosaurs, each covered with mussels, barnacles, periwinkles, and mollusks of all kinds. Below, the rocky pools between them are filled with seaweed and look like giant soup tureens. Alien life-forms scuttle through the algae. My father would get the three of us kids up way before dawn for these extreme minus tides. The heightened bird activity alone meant everything to him, a lifelong bird-watcher, because so many gulls and black oystercatchers descended from the sky. One morning not too long before he died, his girlfriend and my younger brother and I took him to the tide pools. He was fifty-six, eight years younger than Karen. I have a photograph of him in a navy blue knit cap and iconic L.L. Bean Norwegian fisherman's sweater, clutching his walking stick and standing next to a tide pool, smiling broadly. It now takes friends an hour to help Karen get awake, dressed, and down a flight of stairs, and the whole time she's in pain and gasps for breath. Yet she has a photo of herself with a walking stick on the reef at the last minus tide, smiling. She was always beautiful and loved that about herself, and now she looks rather like some sherpa's favorite grandmother in her wool cap and layers of warmth. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and when you are older, around the time when you stop feeling like you've crawled into somebody else's shell, old friends begin to die with appalling regularity. I have been with many people who were dying, and what is revealed besides the worry is all that they loved, both what they will miss and what still fills and feeds them. When I last saw Karen, she told me a story about how once she and her son were about to head back from the tide pools when they saw a coyote come trotting out of the chaparral and run down to the beach, frolicking in the water. Talk about the joy of living. Talk about life making sense.

Chapter 4: Somehow: Transforming Shame Through Grace and Time

We humans screw up; that is our nature. Francis Spufford wrote in his book Unapologetic that the human propensity is to fuck things up. But this one mistake I made was truly reprehensible—I trashed the world's most famous transgender person by retweeting an extremely offensive joke. I cannot stomach hurting people, and that was the worst part. It was a soul-tearing experience to find myself in the role of bigot when I've fought my whole life against bigotry. At the time, nearly ten years ago, the tweet went viral, I was chastised in the media, my son turned on me, and I did everything possible to make amends. I wrote a long and entirely contrite essay in a book. I groveled. I crawled. I felt shitty. I did as much as I could do. And then, because life has to go on, I laid it to rest. But surprise, surprise, not everyone did. I was invited to give the commencement address at a Catholic college graduation by video during COVID. Four days later, my agent called to say that three students had gone to the dean to protest my having been chosen as their commencement speaker, citing my "history of transphobia." The speech was canceled, and worse, the dean sent a letter to thousands of people—students, parents, alumni, and the media—taking responsibility for having inadvertently agreed to have someone with a history of transphobia as the college's commencement speaker. When I make a significant mistake with someone, I slide down the shame spiral. It feels like I have pulled out the wrong block at Jenga and everything crashes to the ground, most painfully my sense of self-worth. Neal did all the right things—coddled me and disparaged the dean. There was an outpouring of affirmation from beloved writers who stepped up and wrote stern letters attesting to my goodness. I lurched through the next few weeks on this love and on my favorite emotional response, victimized self-righteousness. Several months passed, during which I had the great idea to host an online fundraiser for a law firm in Berkeley that does pro bono work with LGBTQ refugees. But two days after arrangements began, the director called to say one of her board members had heard I was transphobic and needed assurance I had "evolved." This was a showstopper. And it's what finally helped me break through. I said I had always been centered in my values of loving and affirming the LGBTQ community. "Look," I said, "I cannot do this with you. Give her my last book, where there's an essay on this experience. This is who I am. I cannot have these discussions anymore. It saps me." The minute I say to the shame, "Oh, you again," I've won. The wicked witch melts into a pool until the next time. I am not who I am when I screw up, but also the dean is not who she was when she sent out that letter, nor the board member asking if I had evolved. As it turns out, the board came crawling back, inviting me enthusiastically to participate. I gave a fabulous talk, and the law firm made a ton of money for this amazing organization. The team sent me the lushest, most beautiful bouquet with, as God is my witness, coin-shaped eucalyptus leaves amid the roses. Eucalyptus leaves always smell woodsy, minty, fresh. You had to laugh. Love is our only hope. Love springs from new life, love springs from death. Somehow.

Chapter 5: The Cowboy in All of Us: Community as Our Saving Grace

If you ever find yourself all turned around underwater and can't tell which way is up, blow bubbles and swim in their direction to the surface. Odds are that people will be waiting up above who were worried when you dropped out of sight. Community is a body of people crying for one another, working together for a common cause, enjoying and overlooking each other's foibles; it's a rough and beautiful quilt sewn of patches that don't seem to go together at all, and then do. Frederick Buechner wrote: "You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own." This is unfortunate. I think Jesus would agree that some people are incredibly annoying. (Many days He had to lie down with a cold compress on his head.) Years ago my friend Mark Yaconelli had a wonderful pastor at his small progressive church. She put a notice in the church newsletter saying: "I'm starting a radical Jesus group. If you are interested, show up Tuesday night." Twenty people showed up the first night with ideas about homeless shelters, boycotting right-wing radio stations, and converting the church to solar power. But the pastor said, "This is all good stuff, but I feel exhausted. Your ideas seem to spring from anger and despair." The following week, someone suggested, "Maybe we should be radical Jesus to each other before we go out and help the world." The pastor jumped on that idea. Only ten came back the next week. One woman said she struggled with her weight and asked if anyone would walk with her each morning. Another loved hosting dinners but was afraid after forgetting guests' dietary needs once. A man needed help fixing his bathroom sink because his handyman father never taught him how. Everyone shared what made them vulnerable, and everyone allowed others to help them. And after the people in the group had been caring for one another for a while, the original dreams came true: they remodeled the church basement to make showers for the homeless, started a soup kitchen, went solar, and helped start a Pride parade for the town. Funny how this love business works. In the recovery community we say, "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection." Some people find true connection at work, in motorcycle gangs, mosques or churches or synagogues or yoga studios. People like me, left to my own devices, keep judging who is or isn't fine enough to audition for our herds. I find this instinct repellent when I see it in others. It keeps me separate from you, from me, from life. I found my way into two seriously spooky groups when I hit bottom: I joined my church drunk, and a year later I got suckered into trying to stay sober for just one day, thirty-seven years ago. You don't have to get it together to find a community; in fact, you might not be able to get it together until you join. You're a human being and that's enough. We're damaged and beautiful, egocentric, loving, driven or not driven enough, and we all have work to contribute. In most of my communities, I've arrived toxic or banged up by life, and strangers showed me how to get back on track. When you've run out of any more good ideas and voice that you need help, the next thing you know you'll be directed to people who are sorting used clothes for Africa, or meditating in sanghas, or staying sober in basements. They will offer you the sacrament of welcome. But to keep it, you must give it away. Giving and receiving is the economy of our souls.

Chapter 6: Fog of Love: Navigating Uncertainty with Hope

The night was socked in with fog when we left our home for a red-eye flight to Cuba. We could not see anything on either side of the Golden Gate Bridge, only the lights of the cars ahead of us. Having lived my whole life in the Bay Area, I am friends with fog, with its waves, its tendrils, how it rolls across the hills, minute droplets that somehow carpet the city. Fog is a dreamscape of revelation and obscurity, sometimes annoying, often gorgeous, then bland, and shifting back and forth, a bit like life. I had always dreamed of going to Cuba, but when I finally got there, I dreamed dark. Havana isn't dark, though, but light-filled and lively, with a surprising amount of silliness for a police state. Absolutely destitute, the people are lovely, affable, peaceful, neither optimistic nor pessimistic but rather resigned. With a mean monthly income of about thirty-five dollars, nobody was complaining. Well, except for me—the cell service was terrible! I hadn't been in Cuba twenty-four hours before I awoke from a dream in which one of my best friends, Janine, broke up with me, told me that I was needy, ridiculous, and unlovable, and that everyone thought this. Neal said that everyone worth their salt shares this fear. "In dreams, scary things get out, everything that has been lurking behind the fog," he explained. "I like fog," I protested. "I like frosted windows, a lid on things." "But then that stuff runs you," he pointed out. We stayed in Old Havana, a fifteen-minute walk to the Malecón, the seawall across the bay from the fortress. Everywhere were baroque and neoclassical monuments side by side with pastel houses in ruins, some buildings as ornate as you'd see in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Most houses had layers and layers of plaster that had peeled off irregularly, so they looked like archaeological digs, both sorry-looking and gorgeous. One morning we took public transportation to Playa Santa María, where we met Nelson and Yenny. Nelson invited Neal to swim out to the sandbar while Yenny and I stayed in the shallows. I discovered she couldn't swim, so I taught her. "Sin nadar?" I asked, which means "Without swimming?" and sí, sí, she couldn't swim. I said, "Enseño," I teach. I got her to trust me, held her by her tummy as she floated, then eventually showed her how to kick and scoop her hands. She swam! We were both screaming and laughing. Later I learned Nelson was in recovery too. "Sobrio. Alcohólicos Anónimos," he said, palming his head. "Bill Wilsonos!" Like me, he had been fished out of the slough of despair. I exclaimed, "Ay, caramba," which I thought meant "Wow" in a happy surprised way, instead of "Oh no," the actual translation. At any rate, we gripped each other, brother and sister under the hot Cuban sun. That night I had another dream—this one about my father's last girlfriend, Bev, with whom I'd had a terrible relationship after my father's death from brain cancer. In the dream, we were both armed, chasing each other, but then she collapsed in a corner. Instead of shooting her, I knelt and cradled her, saying, "I love you. My family can never thank you enough." I woke in shock. If you believe Carl Jung, everyone in a dream is us. This dream about a bossy, greedy person who took the only thing of value my father owned—this prideful woman who thought she was always right—was me. I realized, stupidly, that she had loved my father and he had loved her. She had loved me too. The letter was love. Love wears all these clothes, and it's hard to see through all those jackets because love is territorial, love is anxious, and burdened. Rarely can we get a gust of pure love, but I got one in Cuba from the single last place I ever expected to find it.

Chapter 7: General Instructions: Lessons for Those We'll Leave Behind

I drove to church on Palm Sunday, six days after the latest school shooting. The sky was notable for being blue with fluffy white clouds after two solid weeks of torrential rains. Three more little kids had been shot in Nashville, and three aides; I'd heard a commentator say that the measure of a nation is how many small coffins it allows. I had my Sunday school lesson planned around Jesus riding into town on a young donkey, but as I drove along I realized I couldn't use it. You can't put a nice bow on nightmares. My newest crop of Sunday school kids includes four siblings caught in the middle of a catastrophic divorce. The little one, a tiny nine-year-old girl, sometimes comes to church in tears. Two others are teenagers, and all four of them are brown. Vile racist things happen to them at school. None of them had ever gone to church until their parents showed up at our door, so we teach God 101: God is love, love is God, they are adored and perfect as is. All four were there on Palm Sunday, and I no longer had a plan except to talk with them about the shooting in Nashville, let them share their feelings, and listen. I asked if they'd heard about it. They had. Both nine-year-olds knew that the three dead children had also been nine. "Did your parents and teachers talk to you about how you feel?" I asked. "Not really," said the eldest, the fourteen-year-old boy. "They just told us it had happened and we saw it on the news. We had a shooter drill at school. My mother cried a lot." I closed my eyes for a moment. I heard, loud and clear, that these kids had had enough for one week. So I told them almost everything I know about life: that it is a precious gift, and hard; that it is full of pleasures, messes, delights, loss, suffering, love. I also shoehorned in a suggestion that they pour themselves into reading, that this would give them better lives. "Promise me you'll all read a lot," I said, and they nodded. I told them there's an answer for when bad things happen or people scare you. "Does anyone know what that is?" They looked around. "Run, hide, fight," the teenage boy said. He is right and I cannot stand it. "Stop, drop, and roll?" the older girl volunteered. "Call your mother," the smallest girl said in a tiny quavering voice. "Yes! Or you tell a teacher, an auntie, or us. Any safe adult. Secret of life! Read a lot of books and don't keep bad secrets." I had the kids make cards for four children in Nashville. "It may not seem like much to you," I said, "but because love is God, acts of kindness, compassion, or generosity can be seen as God's grace." While they worked on their cards, I told them the story of the sparrow and the horse. A war horse comes upon a sparrow lying on its back in the street with its feet straight up in the air. "What on earth are you doing?" the horse sneers. "I'm trying to help hold back the darkness," the sparrow replies. "That's absurd," the horse says. "You barely weigh an ounce." "One does what one can," says the sparrow. The nine-year-olds both looked puzzled. "Is that a true story?" one asked. I watched them draw, their faces inward and dreamy, their mouths on the edges of smiles—trees, hearts, dogs, and, improbably, a beaver. This will save them, art and imagination, the power of imaginative joy. It tells us we will not plummet to the ground. We will be caught. The sky takes you out into the cosmos, reminding you that you are very tiny but can experience celestial wonders and oceans of love here, even just slogging along together beneath a perfectly ordinary sky.

Summary

I have quoted my own version of a William Blake line for so long now that I like to think it's mine: We are here to learn to endure the beams of love. This is a radical idea, absolutely contrary to everything I was raised to believe. I was taught to strive, to feel ashamed, to believe I was better than, yet always in danger of lagging behind. What Blake is saying is that none of those things are who I am or why I am here. But without them, who on earth am I? To endure the beams of love—what a nightmare! Love breaks your heart and makes you soft. It gets in past your Brooks Brothers armor and makes your skin permeable. But love is our only hope. When you give someone your best love, you too are filled with warmth. The world can be so lame, disappointing, and even mean, like an alcoholic father towering over us. But we can't give up on love batting last or we are truly doomed. As Carl Sagan said, "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." When the younger ones in our lives ask what love is, perhaps the best answer comes from my six-year-old friend: "It's like, you know—duh." That is all we need to know. It's this feeling, this energy exchange of affection, compassion, kindness, warmth, hope. What Blake actually wrote more than two hundred years ago was: "And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love." If the younger ones can remember only this one idea, that they are here, briefly, a little space to love and to have been loved, then they will have all they need, because love is all they need—love, cough drops, and one another. Good old love, elusive and steadfast, fragile and unbreakable, and always there for the asking; always, somehow.

About Author

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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.

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