Somehow

When the world feels like a headline you can’t bear to read, where do you still find proof that love works? In Somehow, Anne Lamott argues that love is not just an emotion or ideal; it’s our only workable operating system for a difficult life. She contends that the way love shows up—stumbling, ordinary, sometimes hilarious and often enraging—is exactly how it heals us: through embodied care, honest community, radical self-forgiveness, and a stubborn willingness to keep going “somehow.”

Lamott writes in the present tense of real life: you make up with a friend after a rupture; you hand a purple bag of socks and Speed Stick to a stranger; you sing “Ripple” with hundreds of people on a windswept beach; you face a beloved friend’s failing lungs; you revisit an old shame and practice a new boundary. Again and again, love calls you onto a ten-minute walk—past bees and redwoods, toward a memorial bench that holds everyone—and invites you to notice: community, mercy, and the tiny instructions that keep you human.

What Love Is (And Why It’s So Slippery)

Love, for Lamott, is both action and atmosphere. It’s something you do—phone your cranky uncle, foster an old pet, hand a bag of toiletries to a woman on the curb—and something you tune to, like Wi‑Fi, already humming in the background. That’s why she calls it “this stuff,” echoing a six-year-old’s wise shrug. It’s also why she leans on metaphors that keep you grounded: benches that hold a whole neighborhood; trees whose shallow, laced roots keep each other standing; a frog terrified but saved by a pair of cupped hands.

If you want loving feelings, she says, do loving things. And if you struggle to receive love, that’s not a moral failure—it’s the human assignment. You practice receiving the way you practice breath: with reminders, with friends, with tea placed gently in your hands.

Love Within Ten Minutes

Lamott anchors the abstract in a ten-minute walk from her front door: an English garden, boxes of bees, a couple arguing, a memorial bench piled with “free” giveaways, a ninety-year-old neighbor striding past ecstatic bicyclists, and dogs finishing ice cream before a final ride to the vet. Everything is here: birth, loss, small rescues, accidental beauty. Her bet is that eighty percent of what’s true and beautiful in life is visible in that radius. If you can train your attention to it—despite news, dread, and your pinball-brain—you’ll keep finding love’s fingerprints.

“Love is a bench.”

It’s public, weathered, shared, imperfect—and it holds everyone, including you.

Why Receiving Is So Hard

Raised by intellectuals with a family slogan of “figure it out,” Lamott knows what it costs to rely on control, judgment, and self-sufficiency. Love’s opposite, she says, isn’t hate so much as not-love: perfectionism, contempt, isolation. These keep you defended but small. Receiving love asks you to soften—through self-compassion (think Kristin Neff’s research), rupture-and-repair with friends, and rituals that reacquaint you with wonder (singing, prayer, walks, cupcakes-as-communion).

Love’s Friendship with Loss

Somehow doesn’t dodge grief. Love often arrives arm-in-arm with death: in a minus-tide walk with a dying friend; in the memory of a father falling on algae and beaming anyway; in a dream that finally lets you cradle a long-resented caregiver. When loss knocks you flat, love offers practical resurrections—tea with sugar, a hand on your back, a porch prayer at the time you’d most prefer to cancel. That ache you carry is not a sign love failed you; it’s proof that love had you in the first place (see also Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal for a parallel moral imagination).

What You’ll Learn in These Pages

You’ll start with how to be “goodness with skin on”—the smallest ways of loving that reliably crack open a tight heart. You’ll build an inner shelter strong enough to withstand shame-storms and relational weather. You’ll practice crossing thresholds (hinges, doors, and the holy “I don’t know”) into sobriety, boundaries, and repair. You’ll keep vigil at the reef of dying and discover what still sings. You’ll transform public disgrace into medicine, with a protocol you can use on your worst days. You’ll remember that community is where humans happen. And you’ll try on rituals—song, bread, sand-writing, ten-minute noticing—that return you to yourself.

These ideas matter because your life will keep offering the same curriculum: heartbreak, conflict, embarrassment, climate dread, shootings on the news, and the need to teach children what goodness looks like now. Lamott’s claim is not that love explains or fixes all of this. It’s that love equips you to stay, to mend, and to act. It turns out the test isn’t “Were you right?” It’s “Did you help?” And if you failed before lunch, love says there’s still the afternoon. Somehow.

Lamott’s most portable instruction is simple: if you want loving feelings, do loving things. Be “goodness with skin on.” This is not a Hallmark uplift; it’s a gritty practice you can do this afternoon. In her church, it took the form of lavender “swag” bags for unhoused neighbors—porkpie hats, socks, DawnMist lotion, deodorant, toothpaste. Her stories make clear: giving is awkward, imperfect, and still holy.

Do First, Feel Later

You don’t wait for your heart to warm up—action is the heat source. Lamott walks over to a man on a bench who smells like the street and offers a bag and water. He declines toothpaste; he takes socks. She notices her judgments (the live-edge bench! the cigarette ember!), and then chooses not to be right, but kind. The gesture lands imperfectly but truly. Later, she gives a similar bag to a mom and son with a “PLEAS” sign and, in a comic turn, finds her expensive retainer at the bottom of the returned sack. She pays a finder’s fee. Everyone is blessed.

Let People Be the Decider

Her practice rejects the moral calculus of “figure it out.” She doesn’t ask where someone will shower or whether Speed Stick is the right brand. She does not police the outcome: a man only takes socks; a woman wipes her nose on her sweater instead of the tissues offered; the hat is “crunchy” and maybe better for someone named Mick. In other words, you offer help without scripting its use (a posture aligned with harm-reduction and trauma-informed care).

Loaves, Fishes, and Lotion

With Ben, her longtime street friend, the bag becomes communion. He tries on the porkpie hat—“very David Niven.” He reads the lotion label, savoring “pH-balanced.” Lamott riffs: dawn mist softens the glare of reality. The point isn’t stuff; it’s presence. Ben names it: “Kindness is how I feel the movement of God.” (Compare to Dorothy Day’s Works of Mercy: small acts are sacraments.)

How You Can Start

• Pack micro-care. Socks, wipes, a broad-brim hat, lip balm (Lamott catches her oversight), a small note: “You matter.”
• Practice bench theology. Put something on the neighborhood bench. Let the commons work. Resist Nextdoor rants.
• Expect awkwardness. People may refuse, correct, or re-gift your offering. Give anyway.
• Bless, don’t fix. “Bless them, change me,” Lamott prays. It keeps the focus on your heart, not their compliance.

The deeper move here is humility: acts of love decenter you. When Lamott returns to Safeway to ask a mom and son if her retainer might be in their bag, the boy rubs his fingers—cash, please—and she laughs and pays. Life, she concludes, “delivers the unbelievable so often that you might as well believe.”

Your Swag Bag, Metaphorically

Lamott’s lavender bag becomes a symbol for the kind of person you’re becoming: someone who carries mercy supplies. In your version: an extra granola bar, a portable phone charger you can loan, a list of shelters taped in your wallet, the habit of eye contact. The practice expands outward—toward food pantries, letters, rides, and money—and inward, because every brave handoff rearranges your insides. As Mr. Rogers taught (and Lamott channels), “Look for the helpers.” Then be one.

If love is a verb, then these are its smallest conjugations. They won’t fix homelessness, but they will fix some loneliness—yours and someone else’s—for an afternoon. That counts. That’s love with socks and shoes on.

What protects you when shame strikes, a friend calls you out, or the news detonates your nervous system? In Somehow’s “Shelter,” Lamott sketches a survivable interior—part prayer hut, part flannel shirt—where you return to yourself. The case study is her friendship with Tim, a fellow sober traveler who wants freedom from the “bondage of self.” He asks for mentoring; she obliges; then she blows it, and the roof caves in.

Rupture and the Storm of Shame

On Lamott’s couch, Tim lists resentments (men with hair, money, better jobs, Emma with weaponized breasts and a snakeskin purse). Lamott’s “pea brain” shorts out and she gleefully dissects Emma. Hours later, Tim calls: “Listening to the cruel way you talked about Emma, I realized I don’t want to turn out like you.” Lightning. Shame. The inner critic grabs the mic: two-faced, ugly inside, exposed.

Staying With Yourself

Instead of instant fawning texts, she phones her friend Janine (a PSS: Pray Share Shop). “Maybe not today,” Janine says—her refrain that saves Lamott from self-abasement. Lamott prays, journals, puts Tim’s initial in a “God box,” walks among camellias that bloom regardless. Neal, her husband, makes tea and names the inner critic. She remembers Horrible Bonnie’s grace note: “Honey, you are preapproved.”

Simple Rules for Bad Days

Lamott returns to a tiny rule of life she learned early in sobriety. On waking, say “Whatever.” At night: “Oh, well.” In between: acceptance, service, fresh air, opening windows. It’s hilarious and deadly serious. She texts herself apologies when Janine won’t let her text Tim. She takes her own hand—Target date, walk, nap—and discovers curiosity seeping back: a sign she’s safe again.

Repair and the Bloom

Two days later Tim apologizes: he’d taken his Emma-angst out on Lamott. They laugh. The camellias outside, “clownish but also elegant,” say what doctrine can’t: shelter is not walls; it’s a still point within (T. S. Eliot’s phrase). You don’t earn it by being good. You return to it by being honest, by pausing “maybe not today,” by letting friends and trees do what theology sometimes can’t—hold you steady until you can laugh again.

Psychologist Kristin Neff might call this self-compassion’s three moves: mindfulness (notice the shame-storm), common humanity (others do this too), and kindness (tea, walks, “preapproved”). Lamott’s version is funkier but no less rigorous. The payoff is not just calm; it’s the capacity to love again without armoring up.

Doors, in Lamott’s world, are not décor; they’re curriculum. A hinge both holds and opens—exactly what you need when you grow up with creaky screens, secret-keeping, and parents drinking behind closed doors. She tracks a lifetime of thresholds: into her father’s orderly study where she is adored; into a church hall under fluorescent lights where she chooses sobriety; into a red front door where her prodigal son returns clean; into her own life when she stops being her son’s higher power.

Childhood Doors

There’s the back door to tall grass and blackberries—freedom from tension—and the slammed bedroom door that says, “I’m in here; you can’t come in.” Her father’s office door, with rust-flaked hinges, is the first hinge of vocation: books, research, an abacus, the Columbia Encyclopedia. She’s the girl who can make him laugh. Meanwhile, her mother returns from Elizabeth Arden unrecognizable to the baby; “Hmmm,” says Dad, mixing an old-fashioned. The door as portal; the door as rebuff.

The Arched Door of Sobriety

Seven stoned years after her father dies, Lamott stares at a red church door with an arch that says “a little bit of holy.” Inside: bad coffee, cookies, and people she hates recognizing herself in. She wants the land of milk and honey; she gets the parted sea’s algae-slick path. She keeps going. Wilderness follows—memories, therapy, caring for her mother. Sobriety is a door, yes, but it opens to hard miles before any promised land (William Bridges’s transitions map this: ending, neutral zone, beginning).

Saying No, Opening Yes

As a single mom, she finally bars the door to her using son. Horrible Bonnie, her mentor, insists this boundary is love. When he returns ten days sober, she swings the red-splintered door wide. Later, when a beloved ex’s girlfriend moves into his place, she doesn’t slam doors; she births a child and becomes a village. Years pass; exhaustion crescendos; Bonnie prescribes a practice as embarrassing as it is salvific: be your own romantic partner. Buy yourself the corsage; bring tamales home; watch Bob Newhart; say No as a complete sentence.

“I Don’t Know” as Hinge

Lamott and Neal finally fall through a door into late-life love. Their tomato-soup-red front door is battered, peculiar, and beautiful—like them. The hinge squeaks. The viewer lets in only as much world as they can handle. And when the future looms, Neal says, “I don’t know” is a portal—a hinge between certainty and curiosity. You don’t need a drawbridge; you need a door that opens a crack, then a bit more, until there’s room for two dogs, a grandson, and a life you did not plan.

When the ocean rolls back and exposes the reef, everything hidden is suddenly visible: starfish big as dinner plates, anemones jeweled with taffy-pink, rocks like crocodile snouts. Lamott’s closest friend, Karen, is in her own minus tide—lungs failing, life narrowing to Jell‑O, tea, and torches she wants to light on the beach for a living wake. The question isn’t “How do you fix this?” It’s “How do you notice your life force now?”

Seeing What’s Usually Submerged

Minus tides require pre-dawn departures, owls in the trees, rabbits scattering, light that cinematographers crave. Lamott remembers her father slipping on algae, pants wet, face alight with simple aliveness. That’s the current Karen is trying to wade into before the tide returns: not an argument about fairness, but an attention to breath, grandchildren’s faces, a cat’s fur, a coyote frolicking in foam like a kid. (See also Oliver Sacks’s late essays on seeing intensely at the end.)

Be a Helper, and Dance

Their shared history is a collage: scampering in Deer Park as members of the “International Order of the Squirrel,” a tiny handmade book called Annie’s Beautiful Arms, Tuesday dance classes for developmentally disabled adults where a student says, “I liked that girl. She was a helper, and she danced.” Lamott turns that line into a life instruction for her grandson. At the reef, or bedside, or Safeway: help, and dance if possible.

Holding Suck and Sparrows Together

Lamott jokes that Jesus surely said, “Sometimes it all just sucks.” Her Jesuit friends counter with lilies and sparrows: consider daily hope. She replies, “Easy for lilies.” The truth is both/and. You name the suck (hypersensitivity pneumonitis; canceled trips to Maui), then choose a next faithful step (Jell‑O, a story, a walk-as-old-monks). You can measure your love of life by how often you look up—at dawn’s orange wash, at bird mobiles over the reef—and by how you show up for another’s last season with tea, photos, and unvarnished laughter.

Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal insists medicine must help people live well to the end—on their terms. Lamott’s corollary is homier: bring pudding and listen for coyote joy. Watch for the moment when attention flips from dying back to living, even for a minute. That minute is the kingdom breaking in.

Lamott does not sanitize her failures. Years after she retweeted an offensive joke about a trans celebrity, three students protest her as a Catholic college commencement speaker. The dean cancels her talk and emails thousands, naming Lamott’s “history of transphobia.” It’s a shame avalanche. Neal coddles and rails. Friends write public defenses. Lamott remembers: mistakes are never the final word. But you have to call a thing what it is (echoing Luther) before it can heal.

Apricity and Laudable Pus

Apricity—the warmth of sun in winter—arrives as people speak her goodness out loud. That warmth moves because she’s become permeable through exposure. Then Lamott borrows a gruesome metaphor from Robertson Davies: before antibiotics, doctors lanced old wounds to let “laudable pus” drain so healing could start from the inside out. That’s what confession and repair feel like—disgusting and cleansing. (Brené Brown would call this shame resilience: speak it, find empathy, move with values.)

A Protocol for Terrible Days

Lamott keeps a simple launch code when the “Boyfriend”—her nickname for obsessive thinking—is all up in her stuff: gratitude, chores, chocolate, service, breath, nature. She walks to the eucalyptus grove where her mother’s ashes rest and lets the medicinal scent spritz her back to now. Later, while raising funds for an LGBTQ asylum law firm, a board member demands proof she has “evolved.” Lamott draws a boundary: “I know who I am.” She offers her forty years of work and the door to step aside. The board returns, chastened; the event thrives; the thank-you bouquet contains coin-shaped eucalyptus leaves—a wink from the universe.

Reach Out; Don’t Be a Jerk

From 1 John, she paraphrases a rule: reach out to people; don’t be a jerk. It doesn’t mean accept abuse or re-litigate your worst day forever. It means keep repairing, keep serving the most vulnerable, and remember the longest twenty inches on earth—from brain to heart—shorten with practice: tea, lotion, singing, eucalyptus groves. Shame is not your identity; it’s weather. When it returns, say, “Oh, you again,” and start the protocol.

You can survive alone, Lamott admits; you cannot become human alone. The most galvanizing chapter (“Cowboy”) shows how real communities are stitched: not by heroic projects first, but by people daring to need each other. Her friend Mark Yaconelli’s pastor announces a “radical Jesus group.” Week 1 devolves into exhausting activism pitches. Week 2 becomes argument. Week 3, a turn: be radical Jesus to one another first.

Need, Named Out Loud

A woman asks for walking partners to help with weight; two hands shoot up. Another confesses dinner-hosting shame after blowing a guest’s dietary needs; a dozen volunteer to come over. A man says his dad, a handyman, never taught him; his sink has been broken for two months; can someone help fix it? Someone can. Mark admits he won’t pray unless someone sits with him; the pastor parks herself on his porch. Tears and silence count as progress. Only then do they build showers in the church basement, go solar, and throw a Pride parade. The sequence matters.

Grandmothers, Metal Hearts, and Orcas

Lamott’s own circle of eight older women (her bridesmaids) started as grandparents trying to stop rescuing addict children by rescuing their grandchildren. They meet biweekly, ask, “WAIT—Why am I talking?” and repeat “It’s not them.” In Oregon, after a mass shooting, a cable installer makes metal Oregon signs with a heart over Roseburg. Hundreds show up nightly to cut, paint, ship; porta-potties appear; fellowship does the heavy lifting. In the Salish Sea, orcas feed a scoliosis-stricken whale, Tumbo, for years—animals modeling the opposite of rugged individualism. (Compare to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone on social capital lost—and how to rebuild it.)

How You Join a We

• Show up shyly. Say hello. Drink the offered water. Ask, “What do you all do here?”
• Come back a second time. The second time is the hinge.
• Greet the next newcomer: “We’re glad you’re here.”
• Beware cults: if they want your money, your guns, or your unquestioning allegiance, run.

In teams—from soup kitchens to bike brigades after wildfires—Lamott sees “full-court vision”: the Magic Johnson pass over the shoulder because you already know your teammate is there. Service scrubs sarcasm and self-fixation; it equalizes the room. The throne, she says, is the loneliest seat in the house. The table is salvation.

Hope has a sound, Lamott says, and you can usually hear it when people sing. Sometimes it’s hilarious: a dying friend rips a tuba-solo fart in a redwood grove and both of you laugh yourselves lighter. Sometimes it’s sacred: hundreds gather at Baker Beach for Yom Kippur. Instead of tossing breadcrumbs, they write in the sand what they’ll leave behind—perfectionism, hoarding, self-promotion—then sing “Ripple,” the Grateful Dead benediction she and Neal chose for their wedding processional.

Rituals That Re-Tune You

Lamott arrives with a fear-metaphor: the “showroom car” of her curated self that she tricks you into buying. She sketches a primitive sports car in the sand and lets the tide take it. Then she sways and sings. You can’t leave on the next note until you’ve finished the one you’re on. Singing forces presence; presence makes room for mercy. (James K. A. Smith writes similarly about how liturgies recalibrate our loves.)

Hospitality that Sings

Her friend’s friend Paul takes in a Ukrainian family. Afraid to be alone, they prefer the main house to the guesthouse; he bristles and softens, bristles and softens. His wife knows Ukrainian liturgy; one morning she sings while making breakfast; the refugee mother harmonizes; a new household forms. “Resistance is futile,” Lamott jokes. Love makes you soft if you are not careful—and it’s usually too late.

Fog, Havana, and the Letter You’ve Avoided

In Cuba, with scarce Wi‑Fi and a city of baroque ruins, Lamott dreams that her dad’s last partner, Bev—the woman who once turned him out in his bathrobe—points a gun at her. Lamott has one, too. Then Bev collapses, and Lamott cradles her: “I love you. My family can never thank you enough.” Jung would say everyone in your dream is you. The letter she couldn’t open in waking life—old anger, territorial love, pride—reads differently in the fog’s clearing. The translation is mercy.

Swim Lessons and Bill Wilsonos

At Playa Santa María, Lamott teaches Yenny, a young Cuban woman, to float and blow bubbles. “Buena niña!” Meanwhile, her partner Neal swims with Yenny’s boyfriend, who casually says he’s been sober twelve years. “Alcohólicos Anónimos… Bill Wilsonos!” Lamott lights up: thirty-seven for her. Two rescued lives nod in the surf. Song, sand, shared powerlessness—this is how fog lifts, one practice at a time.

What do you tell children the week another school shooting shreds the news? Lamott walks into her tiny church on Palm Sunday with Snyder’s pretzels and a plan to teach about donkeys and hosannas—but the room needs something else. So she listens, prays, feeds sugar (Easter cupcakes as emergency sacrament), and helps the kids make cards for four children in Nashville. It’s not a bow on horror. It’s a hand on the back.

Teach What You Can Carry

She starts with what fits in small hands: read a lot; don’t keep bad secrets; tell a safe adult if you’re scared; “be a helper, and dance.” She names the Easter paradox plainly: Good Friday is terrible; Saturday is dark; Sunday is new life—bulbs, bread, forgiveness. Jesus even washes Judas’s feet. God, she tells them, “can only love.” You don’t have to believe in a wand; you do have to believe in becoming the wand—worried old us lighting small corners.

Sparrows Holding Back the Dark

Lamott retells the parable: a sparrow on its back, feet up, tells a scoffing war horse, “I’m trying to help hold back the darkness.” It weighs an ounce; it does what it can. The kids ask if it’s a true story. In a sense, yes: your ounce matters. You can pick up litter, plant seedlings, deliver meals, write to lawmakers, walk to see a waterfall and listen to the roar—so you remember what power sounds like when it’s not a gun.

A Ten-Minute Walk, Again

They go outside and practice amazement: chickadees saying their own names; sour grass and poppies; cotton-ball clouds shaped like sharks and blimps and, per the quiet teen, “sheepy.” The sky folds them into a cosmos where they’re small and beloved. As Parker Palmer would put it, this is teaching from a place where the soul shows up—not certainties, but companionship.

By the book’s end, Lamott quotes the line she wants on your fridge: we’re put here “a little space” to bear the beams of love (Blake). Endure them, even—let them warm and bruise you into softness. If you can pass that on to a child, or to yourself at 3 a.m., you will have done what matters most.