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Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year Paperback – March 8, 2005

4.4 out of 5 stars 287 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (March 8, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1400079098
  • ISBN-13: 978-1400079094
  • Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (287 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #39,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Paperback
This book is a pleasure to read. Fast, nervous, searching--it's a great reassurance to any woman experiencing the very real demands of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.
Lamott is a self-confessed non-superwoman--preoccupied with Sam in the early months of his life, it is as much as she can do to brush her teeth, let alone get out of bed. Writing, her life's work? She obviously misses it, but for a few difficult months, even as she is sole-breadwinner for her little family--she just can't get up the energy to do it. The reader knows that she finished this book, that she kept on writing--but the reader also understands that for a certain time period Lamott was paralyzed by her new experience.
The book is very obviously adapted from a real journal--prior to Sam's birth, she worries about the fact that he is male. She worries about his alien genitals, and goes for circumcision because it's obviously what she likes in a man, as much as it is for any health reasons. These worries fade once Sam is born, replaced by the reality of colic, poop, and struggle for a balance between "Sam-time" and "Mom-time." It shows Lamott's talent as a writer that this sequential experience of changes in her baby's life comes as a strength, not a weakness.
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Format: Paperback
Anne Lamott's "Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year" is one of the most honest--painfully so--books I've ever read on both pregnancy and new motherhood. Given the strictures of Lamott's situation at the time--no man around to help her or take responsibility for his child--the humor in this book is nothing short of amazing. After a particularly frustrating episode of feeding solids to her son Sam, Lamott writes that the process is a lot like spackling; you fill the hole with stuff, scrape around the sides, try to pack some more stuff in the hole, and so on. This was so true and so perfectly described that I laughed out loud with recognition. Although Lamott's situation isn't everyone's, the difficulties, fears and joys she describes herein are universal to most new parents. This makes a marvelous gift for the new mom who has everything else and who could use a good laugh.
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Format: Paperback
When I gave birth to a son in 1997 I, quite honestly, didn't know what hit me. I felt joy and wonder but I wasn't "blissed out" the way the people around me expected me to be. I was too frightened by my changing life to be able to live in the moment, laugh at the mishaps, and enjoy the "new guy." The "life-line" I found was literally this book. I read it over and over, as if it was some tonic that assuaged my fears about "doing everything right" and being a perfect mother. I can't tell you the number of times I quoted Lamott's writings to others. She helped me get through a difficult period and adjust. This book changed me. Read it. Lamott is a gifted writer who tells it like it (REALLY) is.
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Format: Paperback
With unflinching honesty Anne LaMott loosely recounts the first year of her son's life. As a recovering alcoholic and single Mother, she vacillates between hair pulling frustration and utter awe as her son changes month by month, sometimes day by day. Surrounded by an incredible support staff of friends and family, and an unwavering faith in God she navigates the path of parenthood and life with a wicked sense of humor that leaves you laughing out loud one minute and then pricking your heart with moving eloquence.
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Format: Paperback
I'm a Californian, I'm a writer (Baby Catcher, Scribner 2002), I'm a mother and midwife, and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Anne Lamott fan - and Operating Instructions is one of Annie's very, very best. With wit, humor, and brutal honesty, she chronicles the pregnancy, birth, and 1st year of her son Sam's life. At the same time, she shares the illness, decline and death of her best friend, Pammy. Written with her usual inimitable and quirky take on Life and populated by her usual quirky cast of characters, Operating Instructions will stand the test of time.
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Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
I don't think I would like to meet Ms. Lamott. There's much I do not like about her. She can be shallow, opinionated and superficial. Her politics are reactive. I can say that because I was precisely the same at her age. I think you hit 40 and you start to realize that life is not so dichotomous.

She is a woman of profound faith but doesn't seem to fully realize it- which makes it so alarmingly sincere. This is not a book for the sled right and morally pure. This describes on woman's journey to make sense out out of faith through birth and death. Through addictions and stability. That faith grows not merely in the pure, but like a lotus flower it blooms in the mud. The mud of living a human life. The mud of imperfection.

This book was also like a mirror for me and I am sure others will agree if they challenge themselves. Much of what I disliked about her I can see in myself. That we are all deeply flawed characters; especially when viewing from a position of detachment.

Also, I, like Ms. Lamott, was as left of center without being a communist. I was like that for years. There was a time I said probably the same things against a Bush. But now that I am less political I cringed when reading her political diatribes. To be frank they were utterly superfluous and completely unnecessary. The story would have been more fluid and universal.

Lastly some critics have been outraged over her violent fantasies about her baby. To those people: I would suggest that you've never been a parent. She was simply vomiting out what nearly all parents have felt at one point or another. When you've had 4 hours of sleep in tow days while working and it's 3 in the morning and you have a child who sounds like a slaughtered pig, you think strange things.

I commend Ms. Lamott' courage in writing this book.
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