Lamott's funny, pragmatic thoughts on human foibles and dignity

Good essayists, as E.B. White once observed, don't deceive or conceal. To do so would quickly reveal the writer as a fraud, a bore or both.

White, who died in 1985, and whose decades at The New Yorker produced some of the finest personal ruminations to see print in an American magazine, probably never imagined the likes of fecund writer Anne Lamott. Yet this dreadlocked, recovering-alcoholic, middle-age activist mother and Jesus-emphasizing Christian proves his point beautifully, as she observes her world with honed humor — and without a whiff of deceit or concealment.

Lamott has published six novels, most of them engaging, but she is most original and memorable in her nonfiction and essays. Her latest collection, "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith" (in bookstores Tuesday), travels familiar ground. She writes, as she always has, about how we humans are more similar than not, flawed in some of the same wacky, equalizing ways.

Describing a friend's dance class for special-ed students, she writes: "I will never know how hard it is to be developmentally disabled, but I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways."

Author appearances

Anne Lamott reads from "Grace (Eventually):"

7 p.m., March 29, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park; free (206-366-3333 or www.thirdplacebooks.com)

7 p.m., March 30, Seattle First Baptist Church, Seattle (presented by Elliott Bay Book Co.); free (206- 624-6600 or www.elliottbaybook.com).

She writes about the gifts and betrayals of our bodies in middle age: "Joy is the best makeup. Joy, and good lighting." She rides the emotional roller coaster of raising a now-teenage son and confesses that parenting him has turned old grudges against her own mother, who died a few years ago, into a new kind of love and understanding: "He was on the phone and I heard him say, 'My mom's home. I gotta go bond.' That's how I feel more and more about my mother: that she's home, finally, and I gotta go bond."

Hovering over every topic, whether it's abortion rights, bad service from a carpet salesman or presidential idiocy, is that slippery item mentioned in the book's title: faith. Lamott's invoking of Jesus doesn't resonate for some of us, but one needn't share her messiah-as-buddy view; the lessons transcend her notion of who taught them.

When Lamott found herself trapped in a cab with a creepy driver, hopelessly lost, she did what the great religious thinkers have probably always done, regardless of creed, in times of great trial: "I prayed, the Great Helping Prayer, which goes 'Helphelphelphelp. Helphelphelphelp.' "

This is a Christian even an atheist could still respect in the morning. She's prone to mean-spirited thoughts and a weakness for ice cream, yet somehow believes (and convinces you) that forgiveness, charity, peace and other near-miracles really happen — we just need to keep our eyes open to see them.

When much of a book is drawn from previously published work, as is the case with "Grace (Eventually)," there is a risk that a regular reader will be disappointed. Not so here. Re-read as a collection, these earlier online and magazine pieces combine for a greater weight, like so many coins saved up to buy something long awaited.

The best essay writers, as White observed, are the best precisely because they do what they do over and over again. They don't stagnate, but they don't reinvent themselves either. They wend their way through the cow pies and the wildflowers alike, calling out the truths they discover as they stumble over them. When we're really lucky, we stumble over some truths of our own while they entertain us.

Portland writer Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett is at work on a biography of civil-rights activist Harry Golden, for the University of North Carolina Press.