Anne Lamott and Neal Allen Book Talk
About the event
Fairfax Recreation is pleased to announce another partnership book talk with Wayfinder Bookstore. Beloved Fairfax residents Anne Lamott and Neal Allen will join Wayfinder Bookshop and Fairfax Recreation at the Women’s Club for a conversation about creativity, passion, your inner critic, and more.
We will have copies of Anne and Neal’s new books for sale.
Seating is limited. Please purchase your tickets early to ensure your spot.
About the books
Somehow: Thoughts on Love
From the bestselling author of Dusk, Night, Dawn and Help, Thanks, Wow, a joyful celebration of love
“Love is our only hope,” Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. “It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks.”
In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. “Love just won’t be pinned down,” she says. “It is in our very atmosphere” and lies at the heart of who we are. We are, Lamott says, creatures of love.
In each chapter of Somehow, Lamott refracts all the colors of the spectrum. She explores the unexpected love for a partner later in life. The bruised (and bruising) love for a child who disappoints, even frightens. The sustaining love among a group of sinners, for a community in transition, in the wider world. The lessons she underscores are that love enlightens as it educates, comforts as it energizes, sustains as it surprises.
Somehow is Anne Lamott’s twentieth book, and in it she draws from her own life and experience to delineate the intimate and elemental ways that love buttresses us in the face of despair as it galvanizes us to believe that tomorrow will be better than today. Full of the compassion and humanity that have made Lamott beloved by millions of readers, Somehow is classic Anne Lamott: funny, warm, and wise.
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Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic
“Better Days will help you get to know your inner critic, and quiet its yammering, and in so doing, get to know the person you were born to be.” – Anne Lamott, Author of Dusk Night Dawn, Bird by Bird and others
You know that its scolding voice is harmful to you, but you can’t will it away. You accept a life with short periods of peace and long stretches of stress and anxiety. But you don’t have to.
In this revolutionary new book, Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic, writer and spiritual coach, Neal Allen, examines a critical aspect of the human psyche that often gets ignored – the superego.
Building on Freud’s idea that the superego necessarily forms a person’s moral conscience, Neal explains how this voice in your head develops in childhood as a survival mechanism, but when no longer needed for protection, camps out in your mind like a personal parasite. A parasite that doesn’t belong.
Through simple and engaging exercises and explorations, Neal leads you into meeting, confronting, and ultimately quieting your own inner critic.
By shedding off the burden of the superego, you can overcome tired patterns of reward and punishment, reduce the self-talk that harms you, and ultimately clear an open space for the life you deserve, one that is gentler and more peaceful.
Just imagine…if all that nasty, negative chatter in your head just evaporated … what would you do next?
Better days are just ahead.