Anne Lamott’s prose is dazzling. Consider her description of getting sober:

All I could do for a while was not drink, period. Wake up, not drink for a while, overeat, nap, not drink for a little longer. Then I began to unfold the best I could, so set in my neurotic ways, an origami pinwheel opening each of its flaps to become its original self. (56)

Come on—sobering up as ‘unfolding’? The image of an origami pinwheel opening to the wind? Brilliant.

Everything that which makes Lamott great is here in abundance: brutal honesty offered in unexpectedly apt metaphor. Unfortunately, other areas were weak. Take for example the woman at the well. Modern scholarship recognizes that there is nothing necessarily sexually immoral about this woman—married five times living with someone not her husband is a description of a victim in the ancient world. Still, Lamott uses the old prostitute angle to make her point:

All the “good” women came early, when it was still cool, women who wouldn’t go near her because she was a prostitute. (151)

Nope.

That said, Lamott makes no claim to be a theologian and her poetic perception of human nature more than makes up for it. One more example. When discussing the digging of wells, Lamott writes:

They dug deeper, and deeper. Deep is so un-American now, even radical. We live too often like water skeeters on the surface of the pond, dropping down for a quick bite of insect or e-mail. Deep is the realm of soul. (116)

Hallelujah Anyway is worth the price of admission three times over for her breathtaking command of language, irreverent honesty, and knowledge of human nature—just be sure to do your biblical research elsewhere.

Lamott, Anne. Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy. Riverhead Books, 2017.