Some Assembly Required

Anne Lamott never expected to become a grandmother this soon. When her son, Sam, tells her at nineteen that he is going to be a father, she is stunned, and she does what she has always done with life's upheavals: she starts writing. The result is a journal of the first year of her grandson Jax's life, kept as the whole family adjusts to a new arrival and to the new roles that come with him. Lamott writes about that year in close, funny, and often disarming detail. She and Sam, the son she first wrote about in Operating Instructions, have to work out how to share the work of raising a child when she is no longer the parent in charge and he is suddenly one himself. Neither finds it easy to step back, step up, or figure out where the other fits. The book is a true story told with warmth and candor, moving between tenderness and comedy. It follows how one baby rearranges the people around him, and how love, worry, and humor carry a family through the change.