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Metamorphosis

I woke up with a start at 4 one morning and realized that I was very, very pregnant. Since I had conceived six months earlier, one might have thought that the news would have sunk in before then, and in many ways it had, but it was on that early morning in May that I first realized how severely pregnant I was. What tipped me off was that, lying on my side and needing to turn over, I found myself unable to move. My first thought was that I had had a stroke....
When the NYT named the fifty best recent memoirs, a few days ago, at least one reader asked why Anne Lamott's "Operating Instructions" had been left off the list. Lamott wrote "Operating Instructions" as she was enduring pregnancy, and then finished it somewhere around her son's first birthday. It's very funny--it has Lamott's standard self-deprecation--and it's serious. It features a surprising, painful death. Lamott's great gift is that she can make you laugh while also acknowledging how difficult and scary life is.

"Operating Instructions" is useful to me as I reach the homestretch of a significant nine-month period, because Lamott confesses things I don't hear about in other contexts. For example, she admits that she is bored and confused during a sonogram. And I get that. When I participated in a sonogram, I thought that I was required to feel awed and overwhelmed, but, to be honest, I felt intermittently bored and confused.

Lamott knows that the mind plays tricks on itself. We can *know* we're pregnant, while also not *knowing* we're pregnant. We're not really well-equipped to make our way through life, but we persist, anyway. Lamott's smart writing is a great guide for me, over and over again. I'm so inspired by her life and her career.
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