Analysis Of Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird

The novel Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a book that was written in order to provide “Some instructions on writing and life.” Lamott published the book in 1994 in hopes to share the secrets of what it is truly like to be a writer, as both a warning and as encouragement. Bird by Bird shares with the reader the ironic truth of being a struggling writer through personal experience and humorous stories. Lamott uses memories from her past to help illustrate her points and to help the reader get to know who she is, not only as a writer, but as a person. The author focuses on the true struggles and benefits of being a writer while using metaphors and analogies to express her points, she also wraps her life stories around almost every writing tip.

The way it is written is so vivid and it gets her point across so much more effectively than simply stating the fact. Lamott writes “Metaphors are a great language tool, because they explain the unknown in terms of the known(77).” Her statement reigns true to much of her writing in this book. She uses metaphors to explain the feelings that writers have to those of us who are not writers. Her metaphors often times refer to a part of her childhood that clue the reader into who she is. The book contains an entire chapter entitled “School Lunches” and she really does talk about school lunches for the entirety of the chapter. This chapter that could have been rather boring, was one of my favorites. Lamott relates the pressures and anxieties of school lunches with the pressures and anxieties of being a writer. “Here is the main thing I know about public school lunches: it only looked like a bunch of kids eating lunch. It was really about opening our insides in front of everyone. Just like writing is (34).” She goes on to list the “Do’s and Don’ts” of elementary school lunches and almost each one of them brought back that memory of perfecting my lunch box in elementary school and it creates a broader understanding of what it is like to be a writer. The metaphors that Lamott uses are perfect for the scenario and they are what turned a book about how to write into a humorous, and almost philosophical