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Summary: Hard Laughter - A Moving and Funny Novel about Family Pain
Review: I stumbled onto Anne Lamott while grocery shopping. Marginally coping with a new baby and a three year old I picked up "Operating Instructions-A Journal of My Son's First Year" and threw it into my cart. It quickly became my book of "daily affirmations" for the less than perfect parent. With hopeful anticipation I searched for more of her writing and found "Hard Laughter". I wasn't disappointed. The characters came alive and I realized the author was writing about her own family. These were the same voices I had grown to like so much in her journal. Once again her imperfect, humorous, messy, love-filled life lifted my spirits. I laughed even as I read of her father's diagnosis and treatment of brain cancer. The only disappointment was that it ended too soon and I had to leave the characters I felt I knew so well. I can't wait for more Lamott
Rating:
Summary: Hard Laughter - A Moving and Funny Novel about Family Pain
Review: I stumbled onto Anne Lamott while grocery shopping. Marginally coping with a new baby and a three year old I picked up "Operating Instructions-A Journal of My Son's First Year" and threw it into my cart. It quickly became my book of "daily affirmations" for the less than perfect parent. With hopeful anticipation I searched for more of her writing and found "Hard Laughter". I wasn't disappointed. The characters came alive and I realized the author was writing about her own family. These were the same voices I had grown to like so much in her journal. Once again her imperfect, humorous, messy, love-filled life lifted my spirits. I laughed even as I read of her father's diagnosis and treatment of brain cancer. The only disappointment was that it ended too soon and I had to leave the characters I felt I knew so well. I can't wait for more Lamott
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Summary: Hard Laughter
Review: In this funny and inspiring story Anne Lamott shows us the importance of good friends, close family, and hard laughter. Through the characters' struggles with relationships, careers, and death, we discover the true strength of the human heart: the ability to find beauty in, and endure through, rough times. An important lesson in life and love, highlighted by laugh-out-loud funny lines, make this book memorable and worth experiencing.
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Summary: Hard Laughter
Review: In this funny and inspiring story Anne Lamott shows us the importance of good friends, close family, and hard laughter. Through the characters' struggles with relationships, careers, and death, we discover the true strength of the human heart: the ability to find beauty in, and endure through, rough times. An important lesson in life and love, highlighted by laugh-out-loud funny lines, make this book memorable and worth experiencing.
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Summary: poignant
Review: lamott has once again translated potential tragedy into a spiritual experoence that defies the mere flesh. there is so much to love about this book; my favorite line is where someone is criticizing the teenage lamott for being thin and her father says, "yes. like a gazelle." it's hard not to connect with a book that magically transforms cancer into an abundance of wry love and growth, wihtout exploiting the maudlin aspects of disease into a kind of psychobabble pulp-- no, she adroitly and honestly represents familial love and reality during crisis in a way that touches all who have watched a loved one, or parent, suffer the cruel and senseless blows of a degenerative disease. As always I find her styling and characters superb in their authenticity; she once again demonstrates an unerring voice for dialogue and transmits emotion into a funny, moving account. this is a wonderful book and a great gift to her father. it's difficult to believe this was her first novel, and the rave reviews she received for this brave effort are well deserved....if you liked any of her previous books, I guarantee this will not be a disappointment, but rather a joyous discovery......
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Summary: Love, not 'morality,' is the soul of this book
Review: Laughter can be forced or cheap or light - and then there are the moments when the laughter is best, usually because there is some equal pressure not to laugh, some pain that is so close it hurts to laugh, but you must anyway. Anne Lamott wrote, what is for me, an exquisite book about an unspeakable time in life - when a parent becomes gravely ill. I believe in these characters - precisely because they aren't predictable or tidy. They have big gaps in their development, like most people do. They fall apart and put themselves back together in unexpected, astonishing ways. Each one survives in spite of and because of their love of one another. It is a book of unusual relationships during the days of an extraordinary time. Lamott introduces each character and their actions with a generous spirit. The reader by turns loves, understands, is appalled by, then forgives and loves again each of them. I hated to leave them when the book was over. I wanted to have a beer with them, to take a walk on the beach with them, to laugh with them long and hard at how much life hurts sometimes - and how grand it is to be alive. I recommend this book to anyone who knows the pain and joy of loving extraordinary people. If you want a large-hearted soul to spend time with, read Anne Lamott's "Hard Laughter" - you won't be disappointed.
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Summary: DOESN'T RING TRUE
Review: Maybe it's too much to expect that every Annie Lamott book be great - but this one's a real disappointment. Annie tries to handle the impossible: the life-threatening illness of a beloved father who'd never had any medical problems prior to diagnosis within an addictive family - but the storyline wanders, the characters get fuzzy and in the end we're left with treacly soap-opera garbage that doesn't ring true. Her other books have MUCH more to offer, fortunately.
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Summary: Poignant...
Review: Reading one of Anne Lamott's novels is like taking a refreshing cool bath on the hottest day of the year; it quenches the soul. Additionally, her wonderfully gritty voice resonates from the pages. The story of a family's struggle to keep the happiness going through the most poignant and disarming moments of their lives is insightful, touching and memorable. Hilarious and poignant as ever, Lamott again illustrates how her characters make everything difficult seem worth undertaking. All in all, a wonderful and illuminating read...
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Summary: Praise for Anne Lamott's Hard Laughter
Review: SYNOPSIS: Writer (and sometime housecleaner) Jennifer is twenty-three when her beloved father, Wallace, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This upsetting discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by the course of Wallace's illness as by the emotional wake it sweeps under Jen and her brothers, self-contained Ben and feckless, lovable Randy. With characteristic affection and dead-on accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever closer in the intimacy Jen prizes "among the other estimable things: good music, good hard laughter, good sex, good industry, and good books." PRAISE: "The appeal of this book is ... that it has much to say about how a good family works--any good family--in times both hard and easy....It's a moving and strangely joyful book, a kind of celebration, and it's written with an assurance far beyond the reach of most first novelists." --Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review "If love is details, so is storytelling, and Anne Lamott excels at it. Her way with analogy, metaphor, and evocative detail is subtle; her ability to shift from the specific to the general to the specific again, superb." --Suzanne Mantell, The Nation "Anne Lamott is a novelist of genius." --Los Angeles Times ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anne Lamott is the author of five novels and three works of nonfiction, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. She lives with her son, Sam, in Northern California.
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Summary: This is AnnieLamott in training--a preview of what's to come
Review: The book is a hoot and a hollar. It's good reading, better writing. Her characters, from Megan to Kathleen, Randy to Wallace to Michael, literally rise from the page. Some lines are definite winners: "you can shave my head, but leave the bunny alone," and her comments on friendships and families never miss the mark. My only other observation is that her mind musings tend to grow wordy and a bit tedious, as if this were more of an experimental book.
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