Anne Lamott

American · born 1954

Born April 10, 1954, in San Francisco, California, to the writer Kenneth Lamott and Dorothy Lamott, Anne Lamott grew up in Marin County and attended San Francisco's Drew School before spending two years at Goucher College in Maryland, then leaving without a degree to write. In her twenties she worked as a staff writer for WomenSports magazine and waited tables at a restaurant in Petaluma while trying to build a life as a novelist, publishing her debut, Hard Laughter, in 1980, a first novel written for her father as he was dying of brain cancer. Rosie followed in 1983 and Joe Jones in 1985, the same year she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, but the decade was also one of heavy drinking, and in 1986, after years that had begun to frighten her, she got sober through Alcoholics Anonymous. Three years later, at thirty-five and unmarried, she decided to have a child anyway. Her son Sam was born in August 1989, and the notebook she kept through his first year of life became Operating Instructions (1993), the book that made her name as a memoirist. Bird by Bird followed in 1994, a slim book of writing advice that has stayed in print for decades and become one of the most widely read guides to the writing life. Traveling Mercies (1999) turned to her unlikely, often reluctant embrace of Christianity at a small Presbyterian church in Marin City, a subject she has returned to across a string of later essay collections. In 2009 her son had a child of his own, her grandson Jax, and Lamott and Sam wrote Some Assembly Required (2012) together about his first year as a father. She married Neal Allen in 2019 and continues to write and live in Marin County, California, where she has spent most of her life.