Somehow

“Love is our only hope,” Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. “It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks.”

In Somehow, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has — how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. “Love just won't be pinned down,” she says. “It is in our very atmosphere.” We are, Lamott says, creatures of love.

In each chapter of Somehow, Lamott refracts all the colors of the spectrum. She explores the unexpected love for a partner later in life; the bruised (and bruising) love for a child who disappoints, even frightens; and the sustaining love among a group of sinners, for a community in transition, and in the wider world. The lessons she underscores are that love enlightens as it educates, comforts as it energizes, and sustains as it surprises.

Somehow is Anne Lamott’s twentieth book, and in it she draws from her own life and experience to delineate the intimate and elemental ways that love buttresses us in the face of despair as it galvanizes us to believe that tomorrow will be better than today.

Full of compassion and humanity, Somehow is classic Anne: funny, warm, and wise.