Dusk, Night, Dawn

Anne Lamott offers a collection of personal essays exploring how to sustain faith, courage, and love during times of personal and global crisis. Writing from what she calls "the third third" of life, at age sixty-six, she is recently married to her husband, Neal, and contending with a devastating pandemic, alarming climate reports, a fractured nation, and the ordinary trials of aging. Her central question threads through every chapter: Where does one begin to recover hope, joy, and belief in life when the world seems to have reached the point of no return?

In the Prologue, Lamott locates the beginning of her own renewal at the San Diego airport, where she traveled for a speaking engagement while feeling distant from Neal after an unresolved argument. Her flight was delayed and then canceled. Stranded overnight at an airport hotel, she recalled a night thirty-three years earlier when, newly sober and suicidal at a Miami airport hotel, she called a hotline and an elderly Texan woman arrived, listened to her, fluffed her pillows, and left her with the phrase "Can't never could." In San Diego, Lamott channeled that care for herself and texted a friend, who reframed her marital frustrations: Neal is her friend, someone she gets to sleep with and wake up beside. Throughout the delays, she observed a young girl playing with a hair ribbon near her father, whose arm appeared gnarled from a stroke, eventually wrapping it around his arm and making him smile. Lamott concludes that recovery of faith begins by looking up for brighter ribbons amid dread and delay.

In the first chapter, Lamott explores the soul's resilience through the story of Ali, the daughter of a friend, who killed a pedestrian while driving drunk on New Year's Eve, fled the scene, and was sentenced to two years in prison. In prison, Ali befriended a lifer who had gotten sober behind bars and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. When Ali eventually admitted she might have an alcohol addiction, something shifted. She earned a place in a conservation work program and discovered a baby coyote during cleanup after a river overflow, completing her transformation from a convict number to a protector of life. Lamott presents Ali's story to her Sunday school class as a lesson about the soul, identifying perfectionism and chronic self-contempt as its most toxic conditions.

The second chapter centers on marriage and a kitten named Rosalie, whose adoption was a condition of Lamott's agreeing to Neal's proposal. One morning the kitten disappeared, and Lamott immediately assumed Rosalie was dead. She recognized her catastrophizing as rooted in growing up with parents who had addictions and mental health conditions, where preparing for the worst provided a small measure of control. The kitten reappeared, and from then on, when either partner was afraid, the other said, "The kitten isn't dead. The kitten is in the living room," a shorthand against catastrophic thinking.

In the third chapter, Lamott examines repentance as a reorientation toward life. She visited a nail technician who informed her that her atheist father was in hell and her non-Christian husband was headed there. She connects this fundamentalist certainty to the biblical story of a paralyzed man whom Jesus healed but who then reported Jesus to the authorities, choosing power over gratitude. Lamott defines repentance as leaning closer to life and changing direction.

The fourth chapter explores forgiveness through the image of a nautilus shell, each chamber incrementally larger than the last. Lamott tells the story of Esther, a woman whose husband Lamott had a drunken affair with during her twenties. One year sober, Lamott wrote a letter of contrition, and Esther wrote back saying forgiveness was a Jewish duty, a mitzvah, and she had forgiven Lamott long before. More than thirty years later, Esther appeared at a workshop and gave Lamott eighteen cents taped into a tower, eighteen being a spiritual number in Judaism given as blessings. The encounter left Lamott longing to forgive more deeply, though the urge faded by the time she got home.

In the fifth chapter, Lamott addresses exhaustion through the biblical story of Elijah, who, after confronting a corrupt king and queen, fled to the wilderness in severe depression, praying to die. An angel woke him to eat, and on Mount Sinai he encountered God in a still, small voice. Lamott connects Elijah's depletion to the exhaustion she sees around her. Her friend Terri Tate, a cancer survivor, confessed she was worn out from a lifetime of being a good sport. Another friend, whose son had incurable brain cancer, sustained herself with "lunch-money faith: nothing dramatic, and just enough" (99). At a retreat on Maui shortly after her wedding, Lamott told Neal she was exhausted, cried, and he listened without trying to fix her.

The sixth chapter personifies Lamott's lifelong anxiety as an internal governess called Dread, a figure she created at age three or four to survive the emotional hazards of her childhood. She recounts accidentally swallowing her dog Lady Bird's pills one morning while multitasking, then panicking until she realized her racing heart came from a double espresso, not the medication. Later, when Lady Bird's elevated liver enzymes required an ultrasound, the vet returned with good news: no masses, just old-age changes.

In the seventh chapter, Lamott recounts a panic attack at a storytelling event in Berkeley. She and Neal went to support a friend performing last of six storytellers. As the first storyteller rambled past the time limit and the second delivered uninspired material, Lamott's anxiety escalated into lockjaw and tears. At intermission, a woman celebrating her tenth sobriety birthday recognized Lamott's distress and tapped her back into her body. Throughout the evening, Lamott asks the refrain "Can you love me now?" as each broken part of herself is revealed, arguing that letting someone see the truth of who you are is the greatest gift one can offer.

The eighth chapter narrates a four-day power outage caused by the utility company shutting off electricity to prevent wildfires. At a candlelit church service, Lamott realized the pastor's sermon on judgment applied to her own hard heart toward the unfaithful partner of a friend staying with them. She encountered an uprooted redwood in the woods whose exposed roots became a metaphor for hidden faith, and met her older recovery friend Caroline, who told her that God's love differs from human love, laden with conditions and judgment.

In the ninth chapter, Lamott reflects on love through family heirlooms: her father's ivory elephant, acquired during his missionary parents' travels in India, and her mother's corn-husk angel tree-topper from Hawaii. She threads in the Brothers Grimm tale "The Six Swans," in which a princess sews shirts of stinging nettles to restore her enchanted brothers. The youngest brother's shirt is incomplete, leaving him with one arm and one wing. Lamott identifies with him: "weird, beautiful, hobbled, beloved" (174). She defines love as ruthless and patient, always winning in the long term.

The book closes with Lamott recalling her arrival at the Esalen Institute, a retreat center in Big Sur, half a lifetime ago. On her last night, drunk in the rain, she came to consciousness out of a blackout partway down a rocky hillside above the ocean. She pulled herself back, crawled to the wrong cabin, and stumbled upon a neighboring couple in bed. At breakfast the next morning, the woman from that cabin looked at Lamott with such kindness that something changed inside her. Before leaving, she visited the hillside and watched otters wrapped in kelp. She closes the book crouching at the cliffs, attentive and amazed: "the center held all these hearts beating at the same time, the otters', the ocean's, and mine" (206).