Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Bird by Bird occupies a place between two genres of writing: the memoir and the “craft book.” Memoir is a distinct genre from autobiography, as it typically approaches the writer’s life from a single lens rather than trying to capture the full scope of their life. Memoirists also typically employ far more artistic license in how they shape and tell their story, as their goals are personal and literary rather than political or historical.

Craft books, meanwhile, are meant to instruct the reader in finer points of writing and provide them with an artistic outlook on the process of making fiction or nonfiction. Their popularity increased throughout the second half of the 20th century into today, in part as the rise of academic creative writing programs has led to a much larger audience for craft books. Since craft books often grow out of the classes a writer teaches in a creative writing program—as is the case with Bird by Bird—creative writing programs have a role in generating the books themselves as well as providing an audience for them. Works like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, Matt Bell’s Refuse to be Done, and Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World take a generalist approach to literary craft and theory, while other books such as Virginia Tufte’s Syntax as Style or Graywolf Press’s The Art of series provide a more targeted approach to understanding how writing functions. Often, craft books feature elements that align closely with self-help books, as many writers consider the management of expectations, attitude, and work ethic as central to the art form. Bird by Bird occupies this niche within the genre, as a craft book that explicitly treats writing as a form of self-care and that foregrounds its emotional benefits to the writer over and above any professional or aesthetic concerns.

Throughout Bird by Bird, Lamott works to acknowledge her own literary forebears and to situate her readers within a literary tradition. She credits Ernest Hemingway, for example, with having radically transformed the style of literary prose, clearing away the verbosity of the 19th-century novel to make way for minimalist, action-driven sentences and naturalistic dialogue. At the same time, she notes that Hemingway’s legacy has become too influential in some writing programs, causing students to lose their own authentic voices in trying to emulate his style. From the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi, she draws lessons about the value of paying close attention to the world around you. She turns to the late 20th-century African American novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison to move away from aesthetics and toward the political and moral value of writing, saying that the goal of writing is to become free, and that, as Morrison has said, once you are free, your goal should be “to free someone else” (193).

Bird by Bird is an early exemplar of the merging of these two genres. By mixing moments of personal significance with writing advice, Lamott endows her creative instruction with intensity and relevance. She maintains a disarming, friendly manner in her writing, and she uses self-deprecating humor to connect her own struggles to those of her readers. Her exhortation to write “shitty first drafts,” for example, intentionally defrays her own authority and invites the reader to consider her as a friendly, unself-serious writer who has nevertheless found success on her own terms.