Imperfect Birds

You don’t need me to tell you to read Anne Lamott’s new novel, Imperfect Birds, because you probably will, regardless. And I’ll do my best not to ruin anything for you. Out in April from Riverhead Books (a member of the Penguin Group), Imperfect Birds is the third installment in the story of Rosie Ferguson, her mother Elizabeth, and step-father James.

You know Anne Lamott—novelist, writing guru, and accidental spiritual advisor to a generation of Christians—and to know her is to love her. I think I drank the Kool-Aid at the behest of my friend Lisa, who assured me reading Traveling Mercies every January was one of her favorite parts of the year. I hesitated to peak so early in the calendar, but I was taking a course in spiritual autobiography at the time and read Anne’s first installment in her Thoughts on Faith series. Series I use loosely, as Traveling Mercies and its companions Plan B and Grace (Eventually) hardly resemble a series of, say, the Tolkien variety. They are self-contained artifacts of one woman’s faith journey.

This is something of how Anne operates as a writer. She manages to continue story threads and leave them off with a masterful flick of the wrist. If you read Rosie (1983), your heart went out to the eponymous, precocious little girl—went out to, got tangled up with, and set around her, like Jell-O. With Crooked Little Heart (1997), Rosie and Elizabeth became like old family friends. Similarly, Imperfect Birds serves to confirm our relationship with Anne’s dynamic, wonderful, and wretched characters—all without relying on anything but the story between the pages you’re holding, all without leaving the unfamiliar reader in the dark.

Imperfect Birds carries itself much like its author: wise with age, and handsome. As Rosie approaches the end of high school, pressure and poor decisions threaten to entangle her in a dangerous snare of drugs and ill-fitted relationships. Meanwhile, Elizabeth, the ever-fretful mother, and her husband James dare to walk the line between rescue and tough love for their daughter.

True to fashion, Anne crafts a story the way Elizabeth’s best friend Rae weaves tapestry. Descriptions are lush and vibrant, a litany of sensory conceit. Characters are a wild mixture of honor and insecurity. In short, Anne is a realist, in the realest sense of the word. And, like Rae, she slips in secrets, special fragments hidden between the threads, something just for the reader, something for the soul—things like God’s unending, undying love for you, even at your craziest; like the blessing of medicinal sarcasm; like the redemptive process of breaking down and being put back together.

Anne Lamott is not one to sugarcoat or water down the agony and the ecstasy her characters experience—that of parenthood, adolescence, friendship, marriage—and I think that’s why we love her so much. She is a fresh voice to the human condition; she is a soothing perspective to our own insanity, like the cool burn of Burt’s Beeswax.

This spring, as the earth around our feet bursts into bloom and the migrant birds return north, Riverhead Books will release a new novel from a favorite friend. Imperfect Birds will catch you up and entwine you in its tender nest.