From Anne Lamott, bestselling author of Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Help, Thanks, Wow, comes a new book about the place hope has in our lives.
“I am stockpiling antibiotics for the Apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen,” Anne Lamott admits at the beginning of Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. Despair and uncertainty surround us: in the headlines, in our families, and in ourselves. But even when life is at its bleakest—when everything makes us feel, as Lamott puts it, “doomed, stunned, exhausted, and over-caffeinated”—the seeds of rejuvenation are at hand. “All truth is paradox,” Lamott writes, “and this turns out to be a reason for hope. If you arrive at a place in life that is miserable, it will change.” That is the time when we must pledge, she says, «not to give up, but to do what Wendell Berry wrote: 'Be joyful, though…
