Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

Imperfect Birds

By Anne Lamott

To Be Published April 6, 2010 (Hardcover) Riverhead

I’ve interviewed Anne Lamott a half dozen times — usually we talk about her non-fiction.  Tomorrow morning, we’ll discuss her newest book Imperfect Birds — and her writing.  I’m prepared.  I’ve read a galley of her newest book, which won’t be published for five more months, and I jotted a stack of questions to lead me into a story I will write for Writer’s Digest.   The thing is, the story’s gone deeper than that.

Imperfect Birds is about a recovering alcoholic, her new husband,  and her daughter Rosie.   Annie writes so full.  Never is a sentence just a sentence.  Each leaps and dances, soars and crashes, finally opening a new door.

Rosie seems like the perfect teenager.  Page by page, Annie lifts more of the screen that hides the truth.  Rosie lies to her mother Elizabeth, very convincingly.

It seemed painfully familiar.  I am just finding out now about the lies I was told.  My older son — now five months clean — after battling a dual diagnosis for seven years — lists the drugs he took.  Not just some booze and a bit of pot.  He was stoned all the time and “finished up school early” for getting drunk in public.  He was allowed to walk with his class, but was technically suspended.  I went into one of my fugue states, sitting around the table in the high school principal’s office.

My mother drank too much, and was getting her degree in Early Childhood.  When she didn’t have time to create a sculpture out of clay for a class, my stepfather did.  I came home from school to see a nude torso of my teenage body sitting on the kitchen table.  His only comment was “I know what you look like.”  And then he laughed cruelly.

Reading Annie’s book, I fell into some of my old stories, aching for Rosie and her mom, instead of for the people in my life whom I know.  Addicts lie.  That’s one thing my son tells me over and over.  His thirteenth hospitalization — for his bipolar condition and addictions — was the lucky one.  36-days without the breeze on his skin, then four months in a recovery center.  It worked to have him locked up, gaining back freedom bit by bit. He is sweet and kind again.

I remembered the first rehab — there were three of those, on top of the thirteen hospitalizations.  About a dozen kids under eighteen announced to the new parents, like us, all the drugs they’d done.  Sweet-faced.   Innocent-looking.  You’d never guess.  Like Rosie.  One girl looked like Avril Lavigne.  Her list of drugs — and resulting sex — staggered me.

My son told me we used to be the party house.  Oh great. He said don’t worry, we weren’t the only house. The kids knew my schedule — in bed by 11pm, up at 2:30am — but my then-husband…?  My son said he didn’t care.

Once we sent him on a six-week wilderness journey.  Part of it was in Chile.  I was on the air one morning, and learned of an earthquake in Chile.  I called the headquarters.  They said, “We don’t know where he is.  He separated from the group two weeks ago, and went off on his own with another kid.”

I recognize Elizabeth’s blindness to her daughter’s sinking illness, as my own.  I wonder how much Annie went through in her personal life.  How much was autobiographical.  Solid story.  Sad.  But there is redemption, and there is love.  Really, that is what we have.  Love.

Can you say hallelujah! Yes, I do!