Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

by Anne Lamott

I’m always reminded of that wonderful Virginia Woolf line where she says she and her sister Vanessa would go to parties and end up sitting there like deaf-mutes waiting for the funeral to begin.

It would be intolerable to call a friend, a new mother, when you were really feeling down and for her to say some weird aggressive shit like “Little Phil slept through the night yesterday, isn’t that marvelous since he’s only eight weeks old, and guess what, I’m already fitting back into my prepregnancy clothes.” You’d really have no choice but to hope for disaster to rain down on such a person.