Tough Love

Anne Lamott is digging around in the hatch of her VW Bug, which means the bumper sticker that reads "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" is, appropriately enough, pointed heavenward. "Does anyone need a water for church?" she asks. "Say yes," her friend urges. "It'll make her happy." Lamott looks up, grinning.

Lamott is accustomed to laughing at herself. The essayist and novelist has spent much of the past 30 years chasing profound truths, pinning them to the page and then dousing them with self-deprecating humor. She makes life's terrifying challenges seem small enough to hold in your hand, cameos to contemplate rather than big pictures to overwhelm, whether it's writing a book (Bird by Bird), finding faith (Traveling Mercies) or saying farewell to a loved one (Hard Laughter). See the all TIME 100 novels.

Her new novel, Imperfect Birds (Riverhead; 278 pages), functions in reverse, suggesting all the terror of the big picture. It's about Elizabeth and James, liberal do-gooders from Marin County, California (and the subjects of her previous novels Rosie and Crooked Little Heart), and their daughter Rosie. At 17, Rosie is "black-haired, strapping and fabulous" and an academic high achiever, but she does every drug under the sun, including her peers' parentally dispensed Adderall. The book is a stark illustration of deception, denial and parents' desperate desire to stay loved. You emerge from its last bittersweet pages ready to drug-test your Little Leaguer, if that's what it will take to keep him safe. That's extreme, obviously, but Lamott, though a fierce advocate of civil rights and social justice, wouldn't rule it out for teens who seem at risk.

"I write everything as a wake-up call," she says. "To myself and others, to anyone who may have gotten tired of hitting the snooze button." Imperfect Birds is a well-informed wake-up call. Lamott is a recovering alcoholic, sober since 1986, and has just ushered her son Sam through his high school years in a bohemian enclave of Marin where drugs are there for the asking. Kids who remind her of Rosie are everywhere she turns. On this Sunday morning, she has just returned from a hike to the ocean, where she watched a search-and-rescue team look for a 17-year-old girl from Mill Valley who disappeared during an overnight party with her friends. Inside St. Andrew, Lamott's beloved church, she offers prayers for the search. Later that day, the girl is found in the Pacific, dead.

Lamott has written so much about Sam in her nonfiction--her breakthrough book was 1993's Operating Instructions, a memoir about her first chaotic year of single motherhood--that fans pepper her with questions about him at readings "until I'm like, 'Enough about Sam,'" she jokes. As insatiable as the interest is, she is protective of his life. "People feel like they know me and Sam," she says, but "they know what I have chosen to share with them."

The latest Sam update: he is 20, studying industrial design and father to an 8-month-old boy, Jax. Lamott didn't expect to become a grandmother this soon (she's about to turn 56). "My heart sank," she admits. "But I have written a lot of books about faith, and it was really money-where-your-mouth-is time." Jax "has just been an absolute blessing every step of the way," she says. She keeps perspective: it's better to gain a child to love than to lose one. And being a grandmother is a blast, she says. "It really is like the bonus round."

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