Anne Lamott

Born 1954 · 1 quote

Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction writer, born in 1954. Her words are worth reading for readers interested in both fiction and nonfiction from an American author.

Quotes by Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott's quote library gathers 1 published line in one place. Themes include life, perseverance, and wisdom.

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About Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott, born April 10, 1954, is an American novelist and nonfiction writer based in Marin County, California. She came of age as a writer in California, with San Francisco as her birthplace and a family in which writing was close at hand. Her father, Kenneth Lamott, was also a writer, and he served as an inspiration to her. She graduated from Drew School and spent two years at Goucher College, where she wrote for the newspaper.

Lamott’s work is known for its directness, self-deprecating humor, and willingness to write plainly about difficult parts of life. Her nonfiction is largely autobiographical, and it covers subjects such as alcoholism, single-motherhood, depression, and Christianity. That mix of candor, faith, pain, and comic timing became central to how readers understood her voice: personal without pretending to be tidy, serious without losing the ability to laugh.

Her first published novel, Hard Laughter, was written for her father after he was diagnosed with brain cancer. The book connects her early career to one of the strongest shaping forces in her life, the presence of a parent who was himself a writer. Lamott later became known not only as a novelist and nonfiction writer, but also as a progressive political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. In 1985, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lamott’s public profile widened through Freida Lee Mock’s 1999 documentary Bird by Bird with Annie: A Film Portrait of Writer Anne Lamott. Because of that film and her following on Facebook and other online networks, she has often been called the “People’s Author.” She was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2010. She was also featured on the second episode of the first season of The Midnight Gospel.

Family remains part of her story. Lamott has a son, Sam, born in August 1989, and a grandson, Jax, born in July 2009. In 2019, at age 65, she married Neal Allen, a former vice president for marketing at the McKesson Corporation in San Francisco. Allen, a twice-divorced father of four, has published two books of his own and co-authored Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences with Lamott. The couple met in August 2016.

Lamott has described her aim as writing books she would love to find: honest books about real lives, human hearts, families, secrets, wonder, craziness, and laughter. “Books, for me, are medicine,” she has said. That sentence helps explain why readers keep returning to her work. She writes as someone willing to tell the truth about brokenness and belief, and to make room for humor while doing it.

Source: Wikipedia