Anne Lamott's poignant first novel, reissued in an attractive new edition. Writer (and sometime housecleaner) Jennifer is twenty-three when her beloved father, Wallace, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This catastrophic discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by Wallace's illness as by the emotional wake it sweeps under Jen and her brothers, self-contained Ben and feckless, lovable Randy. With characteristic affection and accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever closer in the intimacy Jen prizes "among the other estimable things: good music, good hard laughter, good sex, good industry, and good books."

"In Hard Laughter, her first novel, Anne Lamott uses a brain tumor to glue together a wandering account of daily survival in a coastline town of northern California. The narrator and protagonist is Jennifer, a 24-year-old aspiring writer, and the tumor is in the brain of Wallace, her father. The setting is Clement, California, a town populated for the most part by a collection of characters as believable as those one might find in comic books. Lamott does well with Jennifer and a remarkable ten-year-old friend, but because many of the characters lack the depth that would bring them alive, the reader is left with a sense of having been only a spectator, of never having been involved in a crisis that demands extraordinary emotional resiliency of Jennifer and her family. The book's conclusion is an admirable exercise in restraint." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)