Anne Lamott freely admits that before she said "Yes" to Jesus, her life was a mess. In some ways it still is.
Her pets keep getting sick and dying. Her home office, where she has just packed up the manuscript of her latest novel -- a two-year project -- and mailed it off to her publisher, looks "kind of like a rummage sale." She is not sure where she stashed the curriculum for the confirmation class she is organizing for her 12-year-old son, Sam, and two other young people in the 100-member Presbyterian church where she is an elder. "I have it in the car, I think," she says, adding ruefully, "That's usually my battle cry -- I have it in the car, I think."
Standing in the back doorway of her cottage nestled among other smallish-size houses on a steep hillside in the San Francisco Bay-area town of Fairfax, California, Lamott greets Saturday afternoon visitors with a plaintive request for help. Her pet kitten died recently, and now Boo-Boots, her 16-year-old cat, is dying of leukemia and kidney failure. The cat needs an injection, and is lying on a towel on an ironing board in the bedroom.
"Do any of you have medical training?" Lamott asks the photographer and two journalists she is meeting for the first time. Of...
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