Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-31% $12.39$12.39
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$9.73$9.73
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Jenson Books Inc
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year Paperback – March 8, 2005
Purchase options and add-ons
It’s not like she’s the only woman to ever have a baby. At thirty-five. 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 that her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out that 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 is a wonderfully lithe writer .... Anyone who has ever had a hard time facing a perfectly ordinary day will identify." —Chicago Tribune
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAnchor
- Publication dateMarch 8, 2005
- Dimensions5.16 x 0.54 x 7.94 inches
- ISBN-101400079098
- ISBN-13978-1400079094
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A funny, self-mocking, vivid account.” —The Washington Post
“Smart, funny, and comforting. . . . 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
“First class all the way. . . . Lamott, along with her novelist’s eye and often poetic prose, has a terrifically black sense of humor. . . . Deeply honest.” —The Detroit News
“Wonderfully candid. . . . Even non-parents will enjoy this glowing work.” —Publishers Weekly
“Lamott here shares her humor, faith, friendships, and irreverence. . . . Operating Instructions is enhanced by Lamott’s colorful and expressive language, her philosophical reflections, and her descriptions of many eccentric friends.” —Library Journal
“One need not be a new parent to appreciate Lamott’s glib and gritty good humor in the face of annihilating weariness. She’ll nourish fans with her entries, and give birth to new ones as well.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Painfully honest, laced with humor and poetry and moments of profound insight. It captures the intense fluctuations of feeling, the rapid alternation of exhilaration and fury, love and despair, that characterizes new parenthood.” —San Francisco Examiner
From the Back Cover
"An enormous triumph . . . Charming . . . Powerful . . . A gracious book, with dozens of lovingly drawn characters and a deep, infectious religiosity throughout. It is also funny." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Smart, funny and comforting . . . Lamott has a conversational style that perfectly conveys her friendly, self-deprecating humor." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A PREFACE OF SORTS
I woke up with a start at 4:00 one morning and realized that I was very, very pregnant. Since I had conceived six months earlier, one might have thought that the news would have sunk in before then, and in many ways it had, but it was on that early morning in May that I first realized how severely pregnant I was. What tipped me off was that, lying on my side and needing to turn over, I found myself unable to move. My first thought was that I had had a stroke.
Nowadays I go around being aware that I am pregnant with the same constancy and lack of surprise with which I go around being aware that I have teeth. But a few times a day the information actually causes me to gasp--how on earth did I come to be in this condition? Well, I have a few suspicions. I mean, I am beginning to put two and two together. See, there was this guy. But the guy is no longer around, and my stomach is noticeably bigger every few days.
I could have had an abortion--the pressure to do so was extraordinary--and if need be, I would take to the streets, armed, to defend the right of any woman for any reason to terminate a pregnancy, but I was totally unable to do so this time psychologically, psychically, emotionally. Just totally. So I am going to have a baby pretty soon, and this has raised some mind-boggling issues.
For instance, it occurs to me over and over that I am much too self-centered, cynical, eccentric, and edgy to raise a baby, especially alone. (The baby's father was dramatically less excited than I was to find out I was pregnant, so much so that I have not seen or heard from him in months and don't expect to ever again.) At thirty-five years old, I may be too old and too tired to be having my first child. And I really did think for several seconds that I might have had a stroke; it is not second nature for me to believe that everything is more or less okay. Clearly, my nerves are shot.
For example, the other day one of the innumerable deer that come down here from the mountain to eat in the garden and drink from the stream remained where it was as I got closer and closer. It was standing between me and my front door. I thought, Boy, they're getting brazen, and I walked closer and closer to it, finally to within four or five feet, when suddenly it tensed. My first thought was that it was about to lunge at me, snarling. Of course it turned instead and bolted through the woods, but I was left with the increasingly familiar sense that I am losing my grasp on reality.
One moment I'm walking along the salt marsh listening to sacred choral music on headphones, convinced that the music is being piped in through my ears, into my head, down my throat, and into my torso where the baby will be able to hear it, and the next moment I'm walking along coaching the baby on how best to grow various body parts. What are you, some kind of nut? I ask myself, and I know the answer is yes, some kind of nut, and maybe one who is not well enough to be a mother. But this is not the worst fear.
Even the three weeks of waiting for the results of the amniocentesis weren't the most fearful part, nor was the amnio itself. It was, in fact, one of the sweetest experiences of my life. My friend Manning drove me into San Francisco and stayed with me through the procedure, and, well, talk about intimate. It made sex look like a game of Twister. I lay there on the little table at the hospital with my stomach sticking out, Manning near my head holding my hands, a nurse by my feet patting me from time to time, one doctor running the ultrasound device around and around the surface of my tummy, the other doctor taking notes until it was his turn with the needles.
The ultrasound doctor was showing me the first pictures of my baby, who was at that point a four-month-old fetus. He was saying, "Ah, there's the head now ... there's the leg ... there's its bottom," and I was watching it all on the screen, nodding, even though it was all just underwater photography, all quite ethereal and murky. Manning said it was like watching those first men on the moon. I pretended to be able to distinguish each section of the baby because I didn't want the doctor to think I was a lousy mother who was already judging the kid for not being photogenically distinct enough. He pointed out the vertebrae, a sweet curved strand of pearls, and then the heart, beating as visibly as a pulsar, and that was when I started to cry.
Then the other doctor took one of his needles and put it right through my stomach, near my belly button, in a circle that the ultrasound doctor had described with the end of a straw. I felt a pinch, and then mild cramping, and that was all, as the doctor began to withdraw some amniotic fluid. Now you probably think, like I thought, that this fluid is some vaguely holy saltwater, flown in from the coast for the occasion, but it is mostly baby pee, light green in color. What they do with it then is to send it to the lab, where they culture it, growing enough cells from the tissue the baby has sloughed off into the amniotic fluid to determine if there are chromosomal abnormalities and whether it is a boy or a girl, if you care to know.
During the first week of waiting, you actually believe your baby is okay, because you saw it scoot around during the ultrasound and because most babies are okay. By the middle of the second week, things are getting a bit dicey in your head, but most of the time you still think the baby is okay. But on the cusp of the second and third weeks, you come to know--not to believe but to know--that you are carrying a baby inside you in only the broadest sense of the word baby, because what is growing in there has a head the size of a mung bean, with almost no brain at all because all available tissue has gone into the building of a breathtaking collection of arms and knees--maybe not too many arms but knees absolutely everywhere.
Finally, though, the nurse who had patted my feet during the amnio called, and the first thing she said was that she had good news, and I thought I might actually throw up from sheer joy. Then she talked about the findings for a while, although I did not hear a word, and then she said, "Do you want to know its sex?" And I said yes I did.
It is a boy. His name is Sam Lamott. Samuel John Stephen Lamott. (My brothers' names are John and Steve.)
A boy. Do you know what that means? Do you know what boys have that girls don't? That's right, there you go. They have penises. And like most of my women friends, I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. Now, I don't know how to put this delicately, but I have never been quite the same since seeing a penis up close while I was on LSD years and years ago. It was an actual penis; I mean, it wasn't like I was staring at my hand for an hour and watched it turn into my grandfather's face and then into a bat and then into a penis. It was the real thing. It was my boyfriend's real thing, and what it looked like was the root of all my insanity, of a lot of my suffering and obsession. It looked like a cross between a snake and a heart.
That is a really intense thing you boys have there, and we internal Americans of the hetero persuasion have really, really conflicted feelings about you external Americans because of the way you wield those things, their power over us, and especially their power over you. I ask you once again to remember the old joke in which the puzzled, defensive man says, "I didn't want to go to Las Vegas," then points to his crotch and says, "He wanted to go to Las Vegas." So it has given me pause to learn that there is a baby boy growing in my belly who apparently has all the right number of hands and feet and arms and legs and knees, a normal-size head, and a penis.
Penises are so--what is the word?--funky. They're wonderful, too, and I love them, but over the years such bad things have happened to me because of them. I've gotten pregnant, even when I tried so hard not to, and I've gotten diseases, where you couldn't see any evidence of disease on the man's dick and he claims not to have anything, but you end up having to get treatment and it's totally humiliating and weird, and the man's always mad at you for having caught it, even though you haven't slept with anyone else for months or even years. It is my secret belief that men love their penises so much that when they take them in to show their doctors, after their women claim to have caught a little something, the male doctors get caught up in this penis love, whack the patient (your lover) on the back, and say thunderously, "Now don't be silly, that's a damn fine penis you've got there."
A man told me once that all men like to look at themselves in the mirror when they're hard, and now I keep picturing Sam in twenty years, gazing at his penis in the mirror while feeling psychologically somewhere between Ivan Boesky and Mickey Mantle. I also know he will be someone who will one day pee with pride, because all men do, standing there manfully tearing bits of toilet paper to shreds with their straight and forceful sprays, carrying on as if this were one of history's great naval battles--the Battle of Midway, for instance. So of course I'm a little edgy about the whole thing, about my child having a penis instead of a nice delicate little lamb of a vagina. But even so, this is still not the worst fear.
No, the worst thing, worse even than sitting around crying about that inevitable day when my son will leave for college, worse than thinking about whether or not in the meantime to get him those hideous baby shots he probably should have but that some babies die from, worse than the fears I have when I lie awake at 3:00 in the morning (that I won't be able to make enough money and will have to live in a tenement house where the rats will bite our heads while we sleep, or that I will lose my arms in some tragic accident and will have to go to court and diaper my son using only my mouth and feet and the judge won't think I've done a good enough job and will put Sam in a foster home), worse even than the fear I feel whenever a car full of teenagers drives past my house going 200 miles an hour on our sleepy little street, worse than thinking about my son being run over by one of those drunken teenagers, or of his one day becoming one of those teenagers-- worse than just about anything else is the agonizing issue of how on earth anyone can bring a child into this world knowing full well that he or she is eventually going to have to go through the seventh and eighth grades.
The seventh and eighth grades were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I've ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit. Seventh and eighth grades were a place into which one descended. One descended from the relative safety and wildness and bigness one felt in sixth grade, eleven years old. Then the worm turned, and it was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn't. One was no longer just some kid. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, and Germany.
I experienced it as being a two-year game of "The Farmer in the Dell." I hung out with the popular crowd, as jester, but boy, when those parties and dances rolled round, this cheese stood alone, watching my friends go steady and kiss, and then, like all you other cheeses, I went home and cried. There we were, all of us cheeses alone, emotionally broken by unrequited love and at the same time amped out of our minds on hormones and shame.
Seventh and eighth grades were about waiting to get picked for teams, waiting to get asked to dance, waiting to grow taller, waiting to grow breasts. They were about praying for God to grow dark hairs on my legs so I could shave them. They were about having pipe-cleaner legs. They were about violence, meanness, chaos. They were about The Lord of the Flies. They were about feeling completely other. But more than anything else, they were about hurt and aloneness. There is a beautiful poem by a man named Roy Fuller, which ends, "Hurt beyond hurting, never to forget," and whenever I remember those lines, which is often, I think of my father's death ten years ago this month, and I think about seventh and eighth grades.
So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?
Product details
- Publisher : Anchor; Reprint edition (March 8, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400079098
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400079094
- Item Weight : 7.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.16 x 0.54 x 7.94 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #16,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #42 in Parenting Boys
- #217 in Women's Biographies
- #657 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; Bird by Bird; Operating Instructions, and the forthcoming Hallelujah Anyway. She is also the author of several novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
I loved her frankness. If you are a parent and have had an infant, you totally get how people shake babies especially on next to no sleep and you’re breastfeeding. Then add colic to that scenario. It’s hard to put them down and walk away but there are times that you must.
There are also times in church, always during the quiet serious part when your baby is the loudest and proudest to be that loud. Whether it be farts, giggles, or both! Who couldn’t help but to laugh?!?
Great read. Loved her take. Loved her style. Now on to read about her son and grandson
Highly recommend.
The first rule... is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second ontvx e is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can't get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can't even pretend that you have, you shouldn't show up. You should stay home, because it's hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed. (p. 100)
I'm amazed at this woman's voice. The book exudes deeply spiritual insights, while at the same time laughing at itself and any spiritual over-seriousness. Every time I see this book's cover, I get a warm feeling remembering it. Grade: A.
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.
Top reviews from other countries
And yet, overall, this book really was an intriguing window into someone's experience of the first year of motherhood, its challenges, joys, and the funny moments, the way you try to mark the milestones, anxiously hoping all's well, while also delighting in how different and unique your kid seems to be already. It's a celebration of community, friendship, and family, and almost about that as much as it is about motherhood. And while I was expecting it to be spiritual, it turned out be just that, in a much more literal way. But like many people (Lamott's not a bestselling author for nothing!), I found Lamott's religious thoughts and beliefs intriguing and often inspiring. I also was often delighted when I'd come upon a particularly poetic, well-put description or idea (her concise description of male genitalia in the opening pages is absolutely brilliant).
Overall, this is an often insightful, sometimes funny, sometimes moving account of one mom's first year of motherhood. There's a lot of loss and desperation but also triumph and, above all, love. So basically, it's what a lot of moms go through. Still, I don't know that it's a book you could give to just ANY new mom. I think someone who's very conservative or traditional may not like it. But you never know - maybe it would still bring them some kind of comfort or simply the joy Lamott's spunky writing style so often conveys, despite her tribulations.