Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is, fittingly, filled with flights: flights of imagination, anxiety, and even selfishness. Each tangent helps turn this ostensible writing guide into a piece of work that is both hilarious and relatable. Especially the selfishness — because, hey, we’re all at it.
Here’s one such flight: Lammot’s two-page mission to find out the name of the ‘wire thing’ on a champagne bottle.
When I was writing my second novel, I got to the part where the man comes over for his first date with the woman and brings with him a bottle of champagne. … So the man has peeled the foil away, and then begins to untwist and remove that wire thing that covers all champagne corks.
Now, I’ve always thought of that wire thing — that little helmet — as the wire thing, and that is how everyone I’ve ever known refers to it: “Honey, will you take the wire thing off the champagne? I just had my nails done.” “Oh look, Skippy’s playing with that little wire thing; I hope she doesn’t cut her little lips on it …”
But it must have a name, right?
And so the hunt begins.
As she phones, but fails to get through to, the local Christian Brothers Winery, she envisions the vineyards:
…The grapes almost seem to glow, with a light dusting of some sort of powdery residue, like an incredibly light snowfall, almost as if they’re covered with their own confectioners’ sugar.
However, this thought is interrupted. A tangent within a tangent.
A friend called and wanted to describe his latest emotional catastrophes, but I said “No, no, talk to me about grapes.”
Eventually — after getting some grape-infused (and -enthused) words from her friend — Lamott reaches someone at the winery’s reception:
She said she always just thought of it as the wire thing, too, so she transferred me to a two-thousand-year-old monk. Or at least this is how he sounded, faint, reedy, out of breath, like Noah after a brisk walk.
And he was so glad I’d called. He actually said so, and sounded like he was. I have secretly believe ever since that he had somehow stayed alive just long enough to be there for my phone call, and that after he answered my question, he hung up, smiled, and keeled over.
“Ah,” he said, when I told him what I was after. “That would be the wire hood.”
There’s a level of expectation on writing guides — they need to practise what they preach. Bird by Bird does just that, and so makes for an excellent teacher. At the very least, you’ll walk away knowing the real name of that wire thing.