Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

With the same brilliant combination of humor and warmth she brought to best seller Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott gives us a smart, funny, and comforting chronicle of single motherhood.

It's not like she's the only woman to ever have a baby. At 35. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all-important first year.

From finding out her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out her best friend and greatest supporter, Pam, will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but very little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events that make up a woman's life.

"Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-deprecating humor." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

"Lamott is a wonderfully lithe writer.... Anyone who has ever had a hard time facing a perfectly ordinary day will identify." (Chicago Tribune)