But oh my goodness, Imperfect Birds: A Novel is dull.
Lamott is a wonderful writer, and there are quotable sentences like "life with most teenagers was like a low-grade bladder infection. It hurt, but you had to tough it out" that made me laugh out loud. She has created interesting, in-depth characters: Elizabeth, trying to stay sober and sane, her husband James, an aspiring novelist, and Rosie, Elizabeth's teenage daughter who has convinced her parents that she's a relatively normal California teenager. The problem is that while Rosie, a straight-A student, has also allowed her parents to think that she only occasionally drinks or uses pot, she's experimenting with everything from Ectasy to 'shrooms.
And that's it. That's the story. It's 200 pages of Rosie deceiving her parents, without any real consequences.
Perhaps I found it so boring because, after years of reading books like Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction to Dry: A Memoir to Drinking: A Love Story , Rosie's spiral into addiction just didn't move me. Sure, her father died, sure, she's insecure. But she's essentially a brat with clueless parents.
But perhaps that's part of the beauty of Lamott's work, in its own weird way. Addiction so often follows the same boring story, with the same inevitable conclusion. That said, you'd be far better off reading her non-fiction or trying one of the above mentioned novels.
