Anne Lamott

The title of Bird by Bird comes from a night when Anne Lamott's brother sat stuck over a school report on birds and their father told him to take it bird by bird. Published in 1994, the book pairs craft advice with the parts of writing nobody advertises: envy, dread, and permission to produce an awful first draft. Lamott grew up in Marin County, California, the daughter of the writer Kenneth Lamott, and left Goucher College after two years. Her nonfiction turns on her recovery from alcoholism and addiction and on the Christian faith she found in a small Presbyterian congregation in Marin City. Dusk, Night, Dawn, subtitled On Revival and Courage, came out in 2021, written in her sixties after she married Neal Allen in 2019, and it asks where a person finds nerve when both the world and the body are going badly. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985.