First published in the spring of 1994, two months before the birth of Amazon and one month after the death of Kurt Cobain, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott has far outlasted the era of its origin, becoming one of the most influential writing guides of all time. During its 31 years in print, it has sold over a million copies. Its title has taken on a life of its own, referenced in TikToks and pep talks. On Ted Lasso, Ted yells, “Bird by bird!” to encourage struggling football players.

The phrase comes from a childhood memory that Lamott recounts early in the book. Her 10-year-old brother had to write a report on birds and procrastinated until the night before. Near tears, he was “immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.” Their father cut through his paralyzing despair by telling him, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” The anecdote is classic Lamott. It conveys “some instructions on writing and life” (the book’s subtitle) in a way that’s quirky, a little bit cheesy, and hard to forget.

I first encountered Bird by Bird when I was a stressed-out teenager looking for someone to teach me how to turn my amorphous literary aspirations into an actual writing career. It helped and (at times) horrified me in a way that still lingers all these years later.

Before Bird by Bird, most of the writing advice I read was about setting standards for smooth, stylish, publishable prose. I gravitated to my grandma’s shelf of old-school how-to-write books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. These books taught me to be persnickety about punctuation, to cultivate a Jiminy Cricket–style internal critic, and/or to strive to write like a Yale man. I also read classic manifestos like George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” with its rousing premise that blurry prose is a political sin, and Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which advised me to “avoid slovenliness of form” and “eschew surplusage.”

All these authors write with robust confidence about the importance of direct, efficient, streamlined writing. They abominate vague ideas and messy sentences, seeing them as an insult to readers, or worse. And with the exception of Twain, who has a rollicking time trashing an author he clearly enjoys, their attitude toward writing is as serious and dignified as the prose style they praise.

It’s no wonder that Bird by Bird was a shock to my system. Lamott’s authorial persona is a neurotic mess—anxious, envious, disorganized, and depressed. She keeps joking about suicide. And her dozens of lurid descriptions of the creative process make sitting at a desk and trying to write seem like a cross between a body horror film and an Alcoholics Anonymous bottoming-out story. A sample:

every form of mental illness … surfaces, leaping out of water like trout: the........

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