Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1994

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Key Figures

Anne Lamott (The Author)

Anne Lamott is an American novelist and essayist. Her first novel, Hard Laughter, was inspired by the end of her father’s life. Anne Lamott’s father—the writer Kenneth Lamott—taught her many of her early lessons in writing, and having the opportunity to share her work with him before his death was an important part of her grieving process. In the introduction of Bird by Bird, Anne explains that she wanted to be a writer because she wanted to be an “artistic, a free spirit [...] working-class person in charge of her own life” (xv). This was partially based on seeing her father work as a writer.

In addition to publishing almost 20 books of fiction and nonfiction over the course of her long career, Lamott has taught for many years at The University of California Davis and at creative writing conferences across the country. In the book, she discusses the mutually sustaining relationship between her writing and teaching practices. The lessons in Bird by Bird are drawn from the advice she offers to her students.

Lamott identifies primarily as a writer, and in Bird by Bird she offers a personal definition of what that identity means: She says, “We’re mimics, we’re parrots—we’re writers” (177). This means she sees herself as an artist who picks up ideas from the world around her, such as reproducing overheard conversations as dialogue. Another aspect of being a writer is being a liar: “A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way” (52). Lamott considers herself someone who lies to reveal underlying truths. Her stories—both fictional and memoir—are rooted in real emotions and experiences.

Kenneth Lamott and Pammy

The title Bird by Bird comes from a piece of advice Lamott’s father, the novelist Kenneth Lamott, once offered to her brother. Anne’s brother, a child at the time, was overwhelmed by the scale of a school assignment on birds, and their father told him to take it “bird by bird.” In the book, Anne Lamott generalizes from this advice to formulate a piece-by-piece approach to the task of writing—one she attributes to her father.

Kenneth Lamott was a Californian writer whose works include the novels The Stockade (1952), The White Sand of Shirahama (1954), and The Bastille Day Parade (1967) along with several works of longform journalism and nonfiction. In her childhood, Anne was embarrassed by her father’s unconventional work life, but her friends “seemed to think I had the coolest possible father: a writer” (xvii). Eventually, she followed in his footsteps, sharing his literary agent and gaining success with her novel inspired by him.

Kenneth and Pammy are Anne’s loved ones who have died, and whose deaths inspired Anne to write books. Pammy was a friend of Anne’s who helped her raise her son. Lamott tells an anecdote in which she went dress shopping with Pammy, who was dying of breast cancer at the time. Lamott worried aloud about her weight and how she looked in the dress she was trying on, and Pammy said, “Annie? I really don’t think you have that kind of time” (170). Lamott took this as a powerful admonition to focus on the things that matter and avoid distraction. She believes that people who are dying, like Pammy, teach you how to live. When Anne showed Pammy the book she wrote about her, “Pammy knew there was something that was going to exist on paper after she was gone, something that was going to be, in a certain way, part of her immortality” (188). Anne shares Pammy’s insights with the reader.

Rankin and Carpenter

Lamott also includes insights from two of her other friends, Rankin and Carpenter. She compares the narrators of her novels to her friends: “I like narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I” (50). Lamott repeatedly refers to Rankin as her “priest friend” (206), and occasionally expands on this, saying he is her “slightly overweight alcoholic gay Catholic priest friend” (127). He offers Lamott advice about issues like jealousy and getting through life. In the latter, he calls himself a “cheerful pessimist” (206).

Don Carpenter is another friend of Lamott’s and, like Lamott, is a writer. Lamott dedicates the book to him. She includes his opinions, such as “we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has” (108). She tells the story of when they both had books launching on the same day and sent each other flowers, “roses and irises” (213). No one else celebrated their publication date. Carpenter understands The Practical Craft of Writing, including how publication is not always as exciting as writers hope it will be.