Anne Lamott first wrote about Elizabeth and her daughter Rosie in the 1980s in a novel named after the daughter. When we meet them, we learn that people in town don't cotton to Elizabeth. She isn't like them. She's prone to laugh at the most inappropriate times, such as her husband's funeral. She can't help it. She is thinking about something that four-year-old Rosie did a few nights ago when they were all alive and together:
Elizabeth held Rosie on her lap, dimly aware that her daughter was trying to take care of her -- Rosie kept patting her and smiling bravely -- but Elizabeth couldn't concentrate on what was happening. ... Over the minister's voice she heard Andrew reading to Rosie the night before he left ... saw Rosie in the closet with the scissors, black curls flattened on one side after a nap, Siamese blue eyes squinted in concentration, cutting up the pants. "For thou art with me," the minister said, as an abrupt, hard laugh escaped from behind Elizabeth's nose.
Rosie whipped her head around and gave her mother a stern look. Elizabeth bowed her head "... Lord for ever." Elizabeth was racked with waves of silent laughter, until another cramped laugh burst out of her nose and she pretended to sob, but Rosie, not fooled, crossed her arm and glared. Behind them, skeptical looks were exchanged. The choir began singing "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," and Elizabeth, hugging her child tightly, shook with suppressed giggles and emitted staccato nasal scraping noises into her daughter's black hair, until tears for the man who had given her Rosie ran down her face.
Lamott returned to these characters in the late '90s with Crooked Little Heart. Teen-age Rosie lives for tennis and she has blossomed:
Rosie and her friends were blooming like spring, budding, lithe, agile as cats. They wore tiny dresses and skirts so short that their frilly satin tennis bloomers showed. ... Cocky and devoted, (Rosie and her tennis partner Simone) loved to be watched by almost everyone but their parents, loved to be watched by other kids, by their pros, by the other kids' pros, and by members of the clubs at which they played -- the weekend duffers who'd look at Rosie Ferguson, thirteen years old and seventy wiry pounds, hitting the ball as hard as almost any man they knew, thick black curls whipping, Siamese blue eyes steely, impassive, twenty bullets in a row, over the net and in, frowning almost imperceptibly if she missed.
Rosie is on the verge of many changes. In 2010, those changes come into full fruition in Lamott's
Imperfect Birds. In a novel bursting out of its seams with little moments, the chronicle of Elizabeth, now an anxious, recovering alcholic, and force of nature Rosie continues. And oh, what a wallop some of those little moments carry.
For example, there is the time Elizabeth finds pills in her daughter's jeans and rationalizes their existence. After all, she's a good kid. She's tried cocaine, done a little pot and booze, and is sexually active. The cocaine "upsets" Elizabeth, but Rosie is a good kid.
Hold on. That's a good kid? Whose behavior doesn't scream trouble at her overprotective mother? After all, Elizabeth is a woman who sits at home days while the others are gone and imagines fatal accidents happening to her loved ones.
It's times like that which may make the reader feel like Margaret Mead reading someone else's field notes. Mother, daughter and longtime stepfather James, and their best friends Rae and Lank, live in an idyllic northern California community that's big on organics, good causes, nondenominational churches, flavored coffee drinks and baked goods. All the adults have pasts and all the kids are developing them. Most spend their time seeking drugs and sex because, like, they can't handle it.
The community Anne Lamott has created feels both homey and exotic. Going by authorial tone, there is no doubt it's a place she feels at home. But as precious as it is, something must be missing because Rosie is seeking something, anything, to keep up with what her friends are doing. There's little sense of why she feels compelled to try the risky behaviors, unless her addictive personality inherited from her mother is factored in. But her friends are doing the same thing. They're all trying as many drugs, as much alcohol and as many sexual partners as they can. Rosie would like to add a teacher to her tally.
Still, exploring why Rosie has gone this route isn't the focus of the novel, although there are portions where an omniscent look at her interior thoughts are recorded. Imperfect Birds isn't quite Elizabeth's story either, because she really doesn't change during the story. She's an anxious recovering alcoholic at the beginning of the story and the same at the end.
Perhaps it's best to say this novel isn't about a main character, but instead is the chronicle of how a relationship is assumed to be close and yet veers close to the edge of an emotional abyss. Lamott sets this up early in telling about a waving Rae made of birds nesting with the inscription: "Each has to enter the nest made by the other imperfect bird":
It was a beautiful line but a lousy system if true, as it offered only the most meager support. And what did it really mean? That you encounter the divine in only the most humble, improbable places? Or that the solace and support the world has to offer are through your tiny tribe's inner patient hospitality, its willingness to accept your impossible lacking self? Could this be enough? ...
Elizabeth reached out and touched her daughter's cheek with her fingertips, and they looked quietly into each other's eyes like friends.
Even with clear evidence, Elizabeth refuses to acknowledge Rosie is in serious trouble. She finds pills in her daughter's clothing, Rosie lies to her and then tells her who can check with to see she isn't lying. And Elizabeth buys it with relief. As things escalate, Elizabeth buys home testing kits that Rosie easily can pass with a bit of trickery. And Elizabeth keeps trying to convince herself and James that things are all right. That Rosie is a good kid. No matter who she's having sex with, or wants to have sex with. No matter how she disappears at night. No matter what pills she's popping and what she's washing them down with. No matter how she's not only lying to Elizabeth and James, but to herself.
The small moments that convey this growing crisis often sound more like an NPR column. Which is appropriate, because James gets a new gig as an NPR columnist and minor local celebrity. The smugness is nearly palpable. But almost as if she realizes what a reader who isn't Anne Lamott might be feeling, Lamott builds in an episode in which James loses his cool in public, in one of those myriad moments that aggravate anyone's life these days. Although the repercussions don't extend to the main narrative arc of Rosie's spiralling out of control, they are exactly the type of reflection that add depth and compassion to Imperfect Birds.
And it's those small moments that may not quite build into a cohesive whole, but which make Lamott worth reading. And which may make a reader wish it's not another 10 years before Lamott devises another novel to imagine what will happen now that Rosie is an adult.
Note: If there is interest in reading books together for upcoming diaries, let me know. After some postgraduate courses this summer, I'd enjoy those book conversations. If you're interested, let me know what titles have particularly caught your attention. Also, if anyone would be interested in contributing a guest diary while I'm at school this summer, I'd be delighted.
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