Reading List

Authors Like Anne Lamott

Q: What should I read after Bird by Bird?

Writing Down the Bones (1986) by Natalie Goldberg, which came out eight years earlier and invented much of the form — short chapters, a spiritual discipline underneath the practical advice, permission as the actual product. Then Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir (2015) if you are writing about your own life, and Stephen King's On Writing (2000) if you want rules rather than encouragement. Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write (1938) is the oldest book of this kind and still one of the best. If you want to be argued with, Verlyn Klinkenborg's Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012) rejects the fast bad first draft outright.

Q: What is Anne Lamott's newest book?

Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, published by Avery on 17 March 2026 and co-written with her husband Neal Allen. It is her first book about writing since Bird by Bird in 1994 — thirty-two years — and it works rule by rule, with each of the thirty-six given a comment from each author in turn. Before that came Somehow: Thoughts on Love (Riverhead, 9 April 2024), which reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. She and Allen also make a conversation podcast together, The Big Questions.

Q: Is Anne Lamott still writing?

Yes. Somehow: Thoughts on Love appeared in April 2024 and Good Writing, co-written with Neal Allen, in March 2026. From October 2023 she also wrote a run of twelve Washington Post opinion pieces about growing older, a series she has since said is finished, and she keeps up a large and unusually direct presence on her own social channels. She married Allen in April 2019, at sixty-five, an event that supplies a good deal of the material in Dusk, Night, Dawn and Somehow.

A short book about how to write, published in 1994 by a woman who had been sober for eight years and was raising a small son on her own in Marin County, and it is still the book people are handed when they say they want to write and cannot begin. Bird by Bird takes its title from a night when her ten-year-old brother sat paralysed in front of a school report on birds he had been given three months to do and their father told him to take it bird by bird. That is the whole method: short assignments, a one-inch picture frame, and explicit permission to produce a first draft that is genuinely terrible. The other half of her shelf is a run of essay collections about faith, beginning with Traveling Mercies in 1999 — she found her way to a small Presbyterian church in Marin City in the 1980s, she has been clean and sober since 7 July 1986, and she writes about both without softening either one. In March 2026 she published her first book about writing in thirty-two years. The ten writers below cover both shelves.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Writing craft · Faith and recovery · California · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If it was Bird by Bird that got you here, the closest single writer is Mary Karr — the only other person on this page who has written both a recovery memoir and a craft book, and The Art of Memoir is the one to read next. For the same permission out of a Zen practice rather than a church, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones came out eight years earlier and largely invented the form. If it is the faith essays you want rather than the writing advice, Nadia Bolz-Weber is the nearest living voice. For the other half of the craft shelf, Stephen King's On Writing; for the argument against her, Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Every book by Anne Lamott →

10 authors like Anne Lamott

Both shelves at once · Closest match

Mary Karr

American · The Liars' Club (1995), Lit (2009), The Art of Memoir (2015)

Karr set off the modern American memoir boom with The Liars' Club, an account of a violent East Texas childhood told in a voice that is funny several beats before it is sad. Lit covers her drinking, the collapse of her marriage and her improbable adult conversion to Catholicism, a faith she describes herself as practising selectively and arguing with. The Art of Memoir is her craft book, built out of decades of teaching at Syracuse, and it is unusually hard on memoirists who quietly improve their own material. She has said publicly that David Foster Wallace was violent toward her during their relationship in the early 1990s, including throwing a coffee table at her; his 2012 biographer documents the same episodes.

The closest match on this page, because she is the only other writer here who has produced both halves of the Lamott shelf: a recovery memoir and a book about how to write. Both came to belief as adults, both keep the conversion comic and unfinished rather than triumphal, and both build a paragraph the same way — a joke in the first clause that has turned into a confession by the last. The difference is register: Karr is the more exact and more technical about craft, Lamott the warmer and more directly consoling. Read Lit beside Traveling Mercies, then The Art of Memoir beside Bird by Bird.

— Lisanne

Every book by Mary Karr →

Authors like Mary Karr →

The direct ancestor

Natalie Goldberg

American · Writing Down the Bones (1986), The Great Failure (2004)

Writing Down the Bones appeared eight years before Bird by Bird and has sold well over two million copies. It treats writing as a sitting practice rather than a skill: timed exercises, keep the hand moving, do not cross out, do not steer. Goldberg practised Zen for more than thirty years, six of them under Dainin Katagiri Roshi in Minneapolis. In The Great Failure (2004) she wrote about discovering after his death that her teacher had had sexual relationships with students, set it beside her own father, and deliberately left neither reckoning resolved. Old Friend from Far Away (2008) extends the same method to memoir.

The direct ancestor of the book most readers arrive for. Bones established the shape Bird by Bird works in — very short chapters, a spiritual discipline running underneath the practical advice, and permission as the actual product — and Lamott's terrible first draft and Goldberg's timed writing are the same instruction issued from two different traditions, one Zen and one Christian. Goldberg is the more procedural of the two: she hands you exercises where Lamott hands you stories about failing. If Bird by Bird got you to the desk, this is the book that keeps you there.

— Lisanne

The nearest living voice

Nadia Bolz-Weber

American · Pastrix (2013), Accidental Saints (2015), Shameless (2019)

Bolz-Weber is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America who founded the Denver congregation House for All Sinners and Saints and led it until 2018, when she left to write and speak full time. She got sober in the early 1990s, worked for years as a stand-up comic, and writes about grace in the vocabulary of a recovery meeting, profanity included. Shameless (2019) argues that the church's teaching on sex has done measurable harm and needs rebuilding; in February 2019 she collected purity rings sent in by readers, had them melted into a sculpture of a vulva and presented it to Gloria Steinem. Conservative Christian outlets attacked the book and the sculpture at length through 2019 and she has retracted neither.

The nearest living voice to Lamott's. Both are recovering alcoholics writing Christian essays in the plain, profane, self-implicating register of a twelve-step share, and both use the same structural move: open with your own worst behaviour, refuse to tidy it up, and let the theology arrive through the mess rather than over the top of it. Bolz-Weber is angrier and far more institutional — she is arguing with a church she is ordained in — where Lamott writes from a pew at a small congregation in Marin City. Start with Pastrix.

— Lisanne

The other half of the craft shelf

Stephen King

American · On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000)

On Writing is half memoir and half toolkit. The memoir half is candid about the years when he was drinking heavily and using cocaine and about the family intervention in the 1980s that ended it; he has said he barely remembers writing Cujo. The toolkit half is prescriptive exactly where Lamott is permissive: cut the second draft by ten per cent, kill the adverbs, write the first draft with the door shut and the second with it open. He finished the book after being hit by a van near his home in June 1999, and the closing section describes writing his way back from it. In January 2020 he posted that he would never consider diversity in matters of art, only quality; after wide criticism, including from that year's nominees, he published a clarification saying that the playing field is not level and that his remark had addressed the wrong question.

The other book on the same shelf, and the one readers most often buy alongside Bird by Bird. What they share is recovery: both are books about writing by writers who got sober and then had to find out whether the work survived it, and both answer yes at length. The methods could hardly differ more. King gives you rules and a daily word count; Lamott gives you permission and a one-inch picture frame. Reading them together is more useful than reading either alone, because the single thing they agree on — write badly, write daily, finish the draft — is the only instruction either one refuses to soften.

— Lisanne

Every book by Stephen King →

The faith essays, at half speed

Kathleen Norris

American · Dakota (1993), The Cloister Walk (1996), Amazing Grace (1998)

Norris was a New York poet who in 1974 inherited her grandparents' house in Lemmon, South Dakota, moved there, and spent two decades working out what the plains and the Benedictine monasteries nearby had to say to a writer with no usable religious vocabulary. She became a Benedictine oblate in 1986 while remaining a Presbyterian. Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith takes the words that repel modern readers — sin, judgement, dogma, salvation — one at a time and tries to make each one usable again. Acedia & Me (2008) sets a monastic term for spiritual listlessness beside the long illness of her husband, the poet David Dwyer, who died in 2003.

The same territory as the faith essays, taken at half the speed. Norris and Lamott arrive in more or less the same place from opposite temperaments: both are literary writers who came to Christian practice as adults and both refuse to write about it in church language. Lamott's Help, Thanks, Wow reduces prayer to three words across a hundred pages; Norris's Amazing Grace takes eighty words and turns each one over for a page or two. Read her when you want the same subject with the jokes turned down and the attention turned up.

— Lisanne

Recovery, researched

Leslie Jamison

American · The Empathy Exams (2014), The Recovering (2018), Splinters (2024)

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath is a long hybrid book: Jamison's own drinking and recovery, a literary history of alcoholic writers from John Berryman to Jean Rhys to Raymond Carver, and reporting on treatment and drug policy in the United States. Its central argument is against the romance of the drunk genius — the interesting story is not the drinking but the dull, repetitive, communal work of stopping, and the clichés of a meeting are clichés because they are true. She directs the nonfiction concentration at Columbia's School of the Arts and has taught a workshop at a transitional house for women in recovery. Splinters (2024) is about divorce and early motherhood. In October 2024 she was among the original signatories of a letter pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions.

Lamott's argument about recovery and writing, made at research length. Both insist that sobriety did not cost them the work, both hold that the story worth telling is the unglamorous repetition afterwards, and both use the shared language of the meeting as a literary form instead of apologising for it. Jamison footnotes where Lamott testifies, and The Recovering is many times the length of anything Lamott has published. If it was the recovery material in Traveling Mercies that held you rather than the theology, this is that argument at full scale.

— Lisanne

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Authors like Leslie Jamison →

Not American · The wounded healer

Henri Nouwen

Dutch · 1932–1996 · The Wounded Healer (1972), The Return of the Prodigal Son (1992)

Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, ordained in Utrecht in 1957, who taught at Notre Dame, Yale Divinity School and Harvard Divinity School before leaving academic life in 1986 for L'Arche Daybreak near Toronto, a community where people with and without developmental disabilities live together. He published thirty-nine books. The Return of the Prodigal Son (1992) is an extended reading of the Rembrandt painting as a portrait of his own life. The Inner Voice of Love (1996) is the private journal he kept through a breakdown in 1987 and 1988, published in the year he died. His biographer Michael Ford wrote afterwards that Nouwen was gay, kept his vow of celibacy, and found the tension between the two a source of the depression those journals record.

The one writer here who is not American, and the source of a move Lamott makes on nearly every page: admit the wound first, and only then say anything useful, on the grounds that nothing else will be believed. Nouwen named it the wounded healer in 1972 and built a whole body of work on it. He is far more disciplined and much less funny — there is not a joke in The Inner Voice of Love — but the shape of a Nouwen paragraph and the shape of a Lamott paragraph are the same. Readers who want the consolation of Help, Thanks, Wow without the Californian comedy tend to end up here.

— Lisanne

The one who came first

Frederick Buechner

American · Godric (1980), The Sacred Journey (1982), Telling Secrets (1991)

Buechner was a novelist first: A Long Day's Dying at twenty-three in 1950, then the Bebb novels and Godric (1980), a Pulitzer finalist narrated by a twelfth-century English hermit. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1958 and taught religion at Phillips Exeter Academy for nine years without ever holding a congregation. His four memoirs, beginning with The Sacred Journey (1982), set the pattern most literary Christian memoir still follows: no doctrine, no altar call, a life narrated as though the reader were being told something in confidence. Their central fact is his father's suicide in 1936, when Buechner was ten, and a family that afterwards never mentioned it. He died in 2022 at ninety-six.

The one who came first. Buechner was publishing Christian memoir that read unmistakably as literature more than a decade before Traveling Mercies, and the permission Lamott now works under — that you may write about faith in your own voice, admit you do not know, and be funny about it — was substantially his to hand on. He is quieter, more formal and much more New England; she is faster and more colloquial. Wishful Thinking (1973), his alphabet of theological terms, is the closest thing on this page to Help, Thanks, Wow.

— Lisanne

Every book by Frederick Buechner →

Older than the genre

Brenda Ueland

American · If You Want to Write (1938)

Ueland was a Minneapolis journalist who began teaching an evening writing class in 1934 and turned it into If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit four years later. Its argument is that everybody is talented and original and has something worth saying, that criticism and self-consciousness are what stop them, and that the writer's real work is mostly getting out of the way. Carl Sandburg called it the best book ever written about how to write. Graywolf Press brought it back into print decades later and it became the press's best-selling title. She was decorated by Norway in 1946 for her reporting on the Quisling trials, walked several miles a day into her nineties, and set an international swimming record in her age group.

The oldest book on this page and the template for the newest one. If You Want to Write predates Bird by Bird by fifty-six years and does exactly the same job: it removes the reader's excuse rather than teaching a technique, it treats fear rather than grammar as the real obstacle, and it is written in a first person that keeps admitting its own failures. What Lamott calls perfectionism, Ueland calls self-consciousness, and the prescription is identical. Read it to see how old this kind of writing book actually is.

— Lisanne

The one who disagrees

Verlyn Klinkenborg

American · b. 1952 · Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012)

Klinkenborg sat on the New York Times editorial board from 1997 to 2013 and teaches writing at Yale. Several Short Sentences About Writing is set in short unjustified lines like verse and argues that most of the received wisdom about writing is not merely wrong but is itself the obstacle: the outline, the topic sentence, the search for flow, writer's block, the idea of a voice waiting to be found, and above all the habit of pouring out a rough draft quickly and fixing it later. His unit is the sentence. You make one, you notice what it actually does, you make the next one, and revision is not a later stage but the work itself. His other books — Making Hay, The Rural Life, Timothy — are about rural America.

The dissenting view, and worth reading precisely because it is aimed at the advice Lamott is most famous for. Bird by Bird tells you to write a bad first draft fast and trust that the good version is somewhere inside it; Klinkenborg holds that the habit teaches you to write badly and to postpone thinking. The two books are almost never shelved together and the disagreement between them is clean, which makes them a genuinely useful pair. Read Lamott to start and Klinkenborg to stop starting: writers who have been drafting for years without finishing often find him the more useful of the two.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Anne Lamott

If you want one writer who does both halves, read Mary Karr.

Lit for the recovery and the conversion, The Art of Memoir for the craft. The closest match on this page.

If you came for the writing advice, read Natalie Goldberg.

Writing Down the Bones (1986). The same permission, out of a Zen practice instead of a church, eight years earlier.

If you came for the faith essays, read Nadia Bolz-Weber.

Pastrix. A Lutheran pastor, sober since the early nineties, writing grace in the language of a meeting.

If you want rules instead of permission, read Stephen King.

On Writing. Same subject, opposite method, and equally honest about the drinking.

If you want the argument against her, read Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Several Short Sentences About Writing. He thinks the fast bad first draft is the problem rather than the cure.

If you want more memoir

My shelf of memoirs has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Anne Lamott

Who should I read if I love Anne Lamott?

Mary Karr first, because she is the only other writer who has produced both halves of Lamott's shelf — a recovery memoir in Lit and a craft book in The Art of Memoir. If it is the writing advice you want, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones is the direct ancestor and Stephen King's On Writing is the other half of the shelf. If it is the faith essays, Nadia Bolz-Weber is the nearest living voice, Kathleen Norris the most literary, and Frederick Buechner the writer who got there first.

What should I read after Bird by Bird?

Writing Down the Bones (1986) by Natalie Goldberg, which came out eight years earlier and invented much of the form — short chapters, a spiritual discipline underneath the practical advice, permission as the actual product. Then Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir (2015) if you are writing about your own life, and Stephen King's On Writing (2000) if you want rules rather than encouragement. Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write (1938) is the oldest book of this kind and still one of the best. If you want to be argued with, Verlyn Klinkenborg's Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012) rejects the fast bad first draft outright.

What is Anne Lamott's newest book?

Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, published by Avery on 17 March 2026 and co-written with her husband Neal Allen. It is her first book about writing since Bird by Bird in 1994 — thirty-two years — and it works rule by rule, with each of the thirty-six given a comment from each author in turn. Before that came Somehow: Thoughts on Love (Riverhead, 9 April 2024), which reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. She and Allen also make a conversation podcast together, The Big Questions.

In what order should I read Anne Lamott's books?

There is no series, so read by subject rather than by date. For writing: Bird by Bird (1994), then Good Writing (2026). For motherhood: Operating Instructions (1993) about her son Sam's first year, then Some Assembly Required (2012), written with Sam about his own son's first year. For faith: start with Traveling Mercies (1999), then Plan B (2005), Help, Thanks, Wow (2012), Small Victories (2014), Almost Everything (2018), Dusk, Night, Dawn (2021) and Somehow (2024). The seven novels, from Hard Laughter (1980) to Imperfect Birds (2010), are the least-read part of her work and can wait.

Is Bird by Bird a religious book?

No, though it is written by a Christian and does not hide it. God turns up in it a handful of times, usually as a joke or an aside, and there is a short chapter about prayer near the end. The bulk of the book is practical and secular: short assignments, the one-inch picture frame, terrible first drafts, dialogue, plot, jealousy of other writers, finding an agent. Readers with no interest in her faith use it constantly. If you want the explicitly religious Lamott, that is a different set of books, beginning with Traveling Mercies in 1999.

What religion is Anne Lamott?

She is a Christian and attends a small Presbyterian church in Marin City, California, which she found in the 1980s and has written about ever since. Her theology is progressive and she says so plainly — she is on the liberal side of most arguments inside American Christianity — and her books are not aimed at people who already agree. She writes far more about doubt, failure and mercy than about doctrine, which is why readers from other traditions and from none read the faith books at all.

Has Anne Lamott written about being an alcoholic?

Yes, extensively, and it is her own material rather than something reported about her. She has been clean and sober since 7 July 1986, marks the date publicly each year, and the getting sober is a recurring subject in Traveling Mercies (1999) and across the later essay collections. If that is the thread you want to follow in other writers: Mary Karr's Lit, Leslie Jamison's The Recovering, Nadia Bolz-Weber's Pastrix and the memoir half of Stephen King's On Writing all cover the same ground, each from a different angle.

Is Anne Lamott controversial?

Not in any large way, but there are two dated incidents worth knowing about. In June 2015 she posted comments about Caitlyn Jenner using male pronouns and a crude line about anatomy, was widely criticised, including by her own son in public, and apologised to transgender people and to parents of transgender children the following day. In December 2023 a dismissive remark about Taylor Swift drew a large and hostile response online. Conservative Christian readers also object to her politics and her theology on a fairly regular basis, which she treats as part of the job.

Are there writers like Anne Lamott who are not Christian?

Yes. Natalie Goldberg comes out of Zen rather than Christianity and her writing books do the same work as Bird by Bird. Leslie Jamison writes about recovery and about the moral uses of writing with no religious frame at all. Stephen King and Verlyn Klinkenborg both write about craft without any spiritual apparatus, from opposite ends of the argument. Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write talks about spirit in a broad and unchurched sense that predates the whole category.

Is Anne Lamott still writing?

Yes. Somehow: Thoughts on Love appeared in April 2024 and Good Writing, co-written with Neal Allen, in March 2026. From October 2023 she also wrote a run of twelve Washington Post opinion pieces about growing older, a series she has since said is finished, and she keeps up a large and unusually direct presence on her own social channels. She married Allen in April 2019, at sixty-five, an event that supplies a good deal of the material in Dusk, Night, Dawn and Somehow.

Sources

List last reviewed 5 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Anne Lamott

10 authors like Anne Lamott

Mary Karr

Natalie Goldberg

Nadia Bolz-Weber

Stephen King

Kathleen Norris

Leslie Jamison

Henri Nouwen

Frederick Buechner

Brenda Ueland

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Where to start if you loved Anne Lamott

Frequently asked questions about authors like Anne Lamott

Who should I read if I love Anne Lamott?

What should I read after Bird by Bird?

What is Anne Lamott's newest book?

In what order should I read Anne Lamott's books?

Is Bird by Bird a religious book?

What religion is Anne Lamott?

Has Anne Lamott written about being an alcoholic?

Is Anne Lamott controversial?

Are there writers like Anne Lamott who are not Christian?

Is Anne Lamott still writing?

Lisanne Swart

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