Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

When Plan A Fails

The title of Anne Lamott’s follow-up to Traveling Mercies is also its thesis: Plan B is the life you live when Plan A — the life you intended, the marriage you expected to last, the country you thought you understood — has failed or been taken away. The essays in this collection are Lamott in her early fifties, with a teenage son, a country at war she considers a moral catastrophe, and a faith that is still very much a work in progress.

The book was published in 2005, during the Iraq War, and Lamott’s response to the political climate is threaded throughout the collection. She does not moderate her views for a general audience — her opposition to the war and to the administration conducting it is direct — but she expresses it with enough humor and self-awareness to avoid the preachy quality that political essays often acquire. The chapter in which she tries to pray for George W. Bush and finds herself unable to is one of the book’s funniest and most honest.

Sam

The essays about her son Sam’s adolescence are the book’s emotional center. Sam is fifteen, and Lamott’s account of the specific textures of this relationship — the simultaneous intensity and withdrawal, the fear and the love, the helplessness of watching someone you made become someone you don’t fully know — is as good as any writing about parenting in the contemporary literature.

What gives these essays their depth is Lamott’s application of her theological vocabulary to the experience of parenting a teenager: the radical powerlessness, the necessity of letting go, the practice of watching someone make their own mistakes. These are the conditions, she argues, under which she has actually learned what faith means.

A Companion Volume

Plan B works best read alongside Traveling Mercies — the two books are less a sequence than a continuing conversation with herself, her readers, her faith, and her life. The voice is identical: warm, funny, self-deprecating, and capable of moving from laughter to genuine emotion within a single paragraph.

Faith Without Certainty

What makes Lamott such a beloved spiritual writer — and so different from the inspirational-bestseller crowd — is that her faith is never tidy or triumphant. The Christianity she practices is messy, doubt-riddled, politically progressive, and stubbornly human; she is a recovering alcoholic with dreadlocks who swears, despairs, and falls short, and who finds God anyway, usually in the least dignified moments. Plan B deepens her ongoing argument that faith in middle age is not the bright certainty of conversion but a daily discipline of staying present with uncertainty, of choosing grace when you can’t manage belief. She has no interest in pretending she has it figured out; the appeal is precisely that she doesn’t, and that she keeps showing up anyway. For readers alienated by both smug religiosity and brittle cynicism, Lamott offers a third way: belief as a practice rather than a possession.

Anger Leavened With Grace

Published at the height of the Iraq War, Plan B is Lamott’s most political collection, and she does not soften her fury at a war and an administration she considers morally catastrophic. The risk in such writing is sanctimony, and Lamott largely escapes it through relentless self-implication — she turns the same skeptical eye on her own rage that she turns on the world. The standout is her account of trying, as her faith demands, to pray for President Bush and finding herself comically, spiritually incapable of it. It is funny, honest, and quietly profound about the gap between the love we aspire to and the resentment we actually feel. Readers who don’t share her politics may bristle, and some find the political essays less rewarding than the personal ones, but even there Lamott’s willingness to expose her own failures of charity keeps the writing human rather than hectoring.

The Lamott Voice

Much of the pleasure of Plan B, as with all Lamott’s work, is simply the company of her prose. She writes the way a very funny, very honest friend talks — looping from a wry observation about her thighs or her road rage into a sudden, disarming insight about mortality or forgiveness, often within the same paragraph. This tonal agility, the ability to be irreverent and reverent at once, is her signature and her gift; it lets her smuggle genuine spiritual weight past readers who would flee a solemn sermon. The essays are short, conversational, and structured by association rather than argument, which makes the collection easy to dip into and hard to put down. Whether she is writing about her dying dog, her aging body, her son’s first heartbreak, or her own relapses into pettiness, the voice never falters — and it is that voice, more than any single insight, that has made Lamott one of the most beloved memoirists of her generation.

Grace in the Wreckage

The collection’s title is its quiet thesis and its lasting gift. Plan A is the life we intend — the marriage that lasts, the body that holds up, the child who stays knowable, the country we thought we understood. Plan B is everything else: the unchosen, unplanned, often unwanted life we actually get when Plan A falls apart. Lamott’s deepest conviction is that grace is most often found not in the life we designed but in the wreckage of the one we didn’t — in the specific, ordinary, humbling mess of real circumstances. This is a genuinely consoling idea, delivered without a trace of saccharine, and it is why her readers return to her again and again. She gives permission to find meaning in failure, presence in powerlessness, and love in the parts of life we would never have chosen.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A worthy companion to Traveling Mercies — Lamott in middle age, still funny, still doubting, still finding grace in the specific, ordinary mess of her actual life.

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