Word by Word with Anne Lamott
Dave Weich, Powells.com
"I've heard someone say that our problems aren't the problem; it's our solutions that are the problem," Anne Lamott reflects. "That tends to be one thing that goes wrong for me—my solutions."
Lamott's readers will attest that she writes cleaner than she's lived. Her younger, occasionally reckless years are documented at length in Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year (one of very few end-of-the-century works included on the Modern Library's list of the 1900s best nonfiction) and Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.
In both her novels and nonfiction, Lamott has an uncanny knack for breaking down complicated issues with common (albeit quirky) sense. Problems don't disappear; they just become infinitely more manageable in the light. She's obsessively honest—a woman of ethics, fruitfully faulted. The San Francisco Chronicle points out, "Anne Lamott is walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath."
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life so thoroughly mixes the one with the other that you forget how they ever seemed distinct. For my money it's the best guide to writing around. Blue Shoe, her sixth novel, speaks to readers with the compassion, humor, and resiliency they've come to expect—and maybe an extra dollop of wisdom since last time, thanks to more living.
She has earned the devotion of a cult following: Lamottites. Together, they recite:
Thanks, Anne,
for that. Right.
No, it makes total sense when
you put it that way,
I know what you mean exactly.
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"A warm, generous and hilarious guide through the writer's world and its treacherous swamps." Los Angeles Times
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"Even at her most serious, she never takes herself or her spirituality too seriously. Lamott is a narrator who has relished and soaked up the details of her existence, equally of mirth and devastation, spirit and grief, and spilled them onto her pages." The New York Times Book Review
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"Readers have long awaited Lamott's second book on spirituality, and it won't disappoint....Traveling Mercies set a very high standard, and to say that Plan B almost gets there is still to say that it's a wonderful read." Kirkus Reviews
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"An enormous triumph . . . Charming . . . Powerful . . . A gracious book, with dozens of lovingly drawn characters and a deep, infectious religiosity throughout. It is also funny." San Francisco Chronicle
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"Moving and funny, fetchingly irreverent and soulful, Blue Shoe is an absolute joy." Chicago Sun-Times
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Out-of-print for fifteen years, the revised edition of Lamott's third novel was reissued by Shoemaker & Hoard in 2003.
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"A fine novel about an eccentric, non-nuclear family with two, then three, and finally four heads, but always with just one heart: Rosie." The New Yorker
Dave: A few days ago I lent Operating
Instructions to a friend at home with her seven-month-old son. As you can
see, it fell into the bathwater. She was very embarrassed, returning it in this
condition, but she loved the book.
Anne Lamott: I actually get a lot of those, the book returned after
it's been in the bathtub. They're all about an inch taller by then.
Dave: She read the whole book in one night. What she most appreciated,
she said, was having another woman express some of the less dignified thoughts
in her head. For example, you write, "One of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage." I think it was that degree of honesty that drove her to read the book straight through,
and I imagine that must be part of what drove you to write it.
Lamott: What drove me to write it was a desire to record my son's life.
It was the first year, and it was just so amazing to have this little unit around.
A surprise at every turn.
Also, I couldn't find books to help me because the ones I found weren't about
being honest or dishonest; they were helpful, but they just offered solutions
to calm the baby or help the baby get to sleep. No one talked about the exhaustion
and the boredom and the frustration, how defeating it is but also how funny
—it struck me as being funny at the same time. I would have loved to find
a book like that, so I wrote one.
Dave: In Traveling
Mercies, you share your private—and often unconventional—ideas
about faith. Was the motivation similar?
Lamott: I was writing pieces at Salon.com;
that's where I try out most of my material. The pieces tend to be about faith.
They tend to be spiritual, but they're about very, very ordinary life. I was
gathering them together, and I realized pretty soon I had a book there.
It was a really inoffensive way to write about spiritual stuff, from the point
of view of somebody who doesn't have a clue but who knows that if I pray my
prayers are answered and who knows there's a lot of help out there in the world
for me. There just is. There's a huge amount of love and support: people making
me laugh about my drama, people that will listen. I guess it's the missionary
thing inside me. I wanted to carry the message that there's a solution.
I've heard someone say that our problems aren't the problem; it's our solutions
that are the problem. That tends to be one thing that goes wrong for me: my
solutions. That's what I tend to write about spiritually in both of those
books.
Dave: I wrote down a line from Operating
Instructions that seemed to be entirely representative of your perspective. Upon considering how much you suddenly stood to lose, now that you had a son to lose, you wrote, "Now I'm fucked unto the Lord."
Lamott: I think I've said that in all my books. My last few, anyway.
Dave: So many assumptions about what it means to be a Christian in
America in 2003, you just turn them inside out. You don't argue, exactly;
that's not your approach. But you mentioned "the missionary thing" a minute
ago, and this recasting of traditional spirituality would seem to be part of
your mission: to make room for a different kind of faith.
Lamott: My sense of mission has to do with having one or two things
that I can offer a world that seems as needy and hungry as I sometimes feel.
Sometimes it's about writing, if it's Bird
by Bird, and sometimes it's about just trying to help other parents know
that we're all in the same boat.
There's that terrible feeling of isolation when things are going badly as
a parent. Or in the case of Blue
Shoe (which is about a woman who is a Christian in the same way I am; that
is to say, she has a colorful way of expressing herself), Mattie has a mother
with Alzheimer's, but Mattie also has two little kids. I have information about
being able to survive in that position: being a mother to some children and
being the daughter of a parent who really didn't effectively parent you at all,
who you are still mad at; and at the same time trying to live on a spiritual path
of loving kindness.
I feel a mission to write about the real stuff, the stuff that people and
I talk about when we're finally getting down to business, when we're not just
socializing.
Dave: Do you encounter much resistance from Christians with more conservative
views?
Lamott: Mostly people that are strict, right-wing Christians know not
to read me. Most of the people that are aware of my books know that I'm going
to be approaching God from a different angle than, say, Pat Robertson is. If
I'm on the radio, if I'm on a Christian station especially, but not even necessarily,
sometimes just on any old station, fundamentalists will call in and just try
to expose all the errors in my thinking and in my faith, which you really can't
do.
Some people are horrified that I have such an accepting sense of Jesus: that
He would accept someone like me, who talks like me, that He would love and accept
everybody bar no one. My politics tend to be those of a progressive with certain
radical leanings. I come to my Christianity from that point of view. The character
in Blue Shoe,
her mother is an old-time left-wing activist, and is kind of horrified by her
daughter's Christianity—more actively so than my own mother was. My mother,
I think she just rolled her eyes about it and thought of it as my little blind
spot. Mattie's family thinks her Christianity is just a phase and that it will
pass. So I guess I get that to some extent.
I don't try to convert anyone. I don't think it's my business, and I don't
think I would be able to do that anyway. I just want to tell people what it's
like for me and what a wreck I was and how much less of a wreck I am now that
I've found a spiritual community. Sometimes I tell it in drama, in fiction,
and sometimes I just tell stories from my own life.
Dave: There's a scene in one of the books where you're talking with your therapist, drawing meaning from various
knickknacks on the shelves. Rereading that, I thought of the blue shoe in this
new novel: an otherwise insignificant item that takes on a great deal of meaning.
And there really was a blue shoe in your life, right?
Lamott: There was. Almost twenty years ago, I was living in Petaluma
and I split up with this man I'd been living with. I told a friend in the town
where I grew up that I needed to come stay with her for two weeks. I stayed
forever, but we were walking into town one day, I was very depressed, and I
just put a quarter in a gumball machine because I was bored. This stupid little
turquoise rubber shoe came out. And I just loved it. I could wrap my fingers
around it? It tethered me to the earth or something. It felt like I was holding
hands with someone, or something like that. Pat, whom I was staying with, would
make fun of me, but I couldn't put it down.
When her situation changed in life and things got hard for her, one morning
I left the blue shoe for her to have with a little note that said I would walk
her through these challenges; she didn't have to worry, but I thought she needed
the blue shoe. And she couldn't put it down. It was so nutty. She was very fancy
and much older than I was, and yet the same thing happened for her: Once she
held it, she couldn't put it down. Six months later things changed in my life
and she gave it back to me. We did this back-and-forth for years.
It struck me as being a really nice and unusual way to tell the story of best
friends over time. Mattie
is obviously in love with this man, and he's just a wonderful guy, but he's
married. It's about five years in their life with the blue shoe being exchanged
back and forth.
Dave: Most fiction writers haven't put their own story out there in such detail. Because people know so much about you, is it more difficult to write
fiction?
Lamott: People think they know so much about me. The stuff that
I choose to write about in my books is stuff I'm comfortable with. It's not
secret stuff anymore. I tell the people I'm closest to what's really going on
in my deepest parts. By the time I share stuff, whether it's in fiction or nonfiction,
I don't have any worry about it at all.
There's nothing in Traveling
Mercies or Operating
Instructions or Bird
by Bird that I think is shocking. In Blue
Shoe, Mattie is obviously very much based on me, not the facts of her life,
but her emotional and spiritual and political life. Because it's fiction, I
could have her do stuff or think stuff I'd only have said to a couple people.
I'm exhilarated by the truth. If somebody writes a book that is incredibly
honest, even what people would call confessional, I'm just exhilarated by it.
Dave: When you're struggling to get words on the page, would you say
that it's because you're not connecting to that truth?
Lamott: I think writing is just really hard. I don't deconstruct it,
and I don't have any interesting theories about it. I really don't. I just think
it's hard. Blue
Shoe is my ninth book, and it was just as hard as any of the others. I don't
have that much more confidence than I ever had. It doesn't matter how they do.
It's such a lonely, odd business.
Most writers I know have a combination of self-loathing and great narcissism.
It's very easy to think that everything you've thought or done or heard is really
interesting, and it's obviously not. Everything I write, I write many drafts
of. Even a Salon piece probably takes five drafts to make it sound natural.
Then people say, "Oh, you write just like you talk." But it took me five drafts
to get it to sound that way.
I write terrible first drafts. I don't think about things like narrative drive
or structure or whatever, and it probably shows; that's probably what my critics
would say. But the first draft is so intuitive. It's about flailing, but the
characters know what happens to them and what they're about, what the interesting
part of their story really is. If I pay attention to getting to know them along
the way, little by little they help me get to it.
Dave: You offer a great example of that method in Bird
by Bird in the passage that begins by talking about school lunches and soon
enough works its way to the real subject, a lone boy standing in front of a
fence. That boy wasn't your conscious subject at all when you sat down to write.
Do similar moments come to mind in the composition of Blue
Shoe?
Lamott: There are so many passages in Blue
Shoe that I thought were about one thing—I tried to capture them, but they were like little Möbius strips; I'd be writing a little passage
and it would loop back over itself. It would turn out that where we were going
to go together, it and me, was as much of a surprise as that section in Bird
by Bird about the school lunches.
Dave: While we're on the subject of school lunches, why do kids prefer
grape jelly?
Lamott: Grape jelly has no texture. It has no
resistance. It has no seeds. It makes absolutely no attempt to appeal to adults. It's like candy jelly.
Most other jams and jellies, adults might eat—even strawberry jam, which
is the second best one. I love raspberry jam, but, see, those are adult things;
there are seeds. Grape jelly is Jell-O filled with sugar that you put on bread.
And it's purple. What's not to like? Plus, the adults don't want it. It's yours.
Dave: A few weeks ago, you republished Joe
Jones. So many writers are reluctant
to revisit their old work; they just don't want to face it. What made you do
that?
Lamott: I wrote the novel, my third novel, after Hard
Laughter and Rosie,
in the last few years of my drinking. It came out in 1985; I got sober in 1986.
It was just so critically trashed. It was such a disaster. I went from Hard
Laughter, which is so autobiographical, to Rosie,
which was a much better written book. It was third person. It was more like
a real book. I think people thought there would be a natural trajectory and
the next book would be better than Rosie,
that it would show more skill and more evolution of my voice, but it was just
a mess in a lot of ways. First of all, it was in the present tense, which I
don't like in novels usually. And it had people speaking all the time, people
who worked at this broken-down dive of a restaurant, who wouldn't have mattered
to anyone else on earth. I did the best I could with these characters that I
absolutely loved, and it was just a disaster. People basically pretended it
hadn't even been published, even at the time. Then over the years it was like
a kid I'd had who wasn't invited to the table.
Meanwhile, my editor, Jack Shoemaker from North Pointe—he published
Joe Jones,
then All New
People, which was my first sober book and which did really well; then he
published Operating
Instructions and Bird
by Bird—well, he had gone on to a new house that he'd formed, and
he'd always loved this book. There was always a group of people that loved Joe
Jones, including my therapist, which is funny, I think, and kind of a small
cult following that would come to readings. The book is very primitive. There's
a kind of wolfishness about it. Something in it touched them in a way that better
writing didn't. They loved the characters, which I always did too. But, you
know, I'd never read it sober.
When Jack really started pushing me to reissue it, I was very nervous because
I believed what all the reviews had said, and what I'd come to believe was that
it was a failure about people I liked. I had to read it for the first time,
and I was simultaneously horrified and falling in love. Jack said that he thought
I should go ahead and change anything I wanted, but I didn't want to rewrite
it or do another draft. Jack's wife, the great novelist Jane
Vandenburgh, who wrote Failure
to Zigzag and The
Physics of Sunset, has always loved that book. She went through it with
me. With the lightest possible touch, we jiggled here and snipped there and
just made things a little clearer. It's probably about five percent words that
are changed. Then my boyfriend made a beautiful cover for it. It just seemed
like the right thing to do.
I'm glad it's at the table again. I don't convert people and I don't insist
they read anything I wrote, but it's there. People have often asked at readings,
"Where can I get Joe
Jones?" It was out-of-print so long. Now I can say that it's probably in
the store.
Dave: As a native of the Bay area, what do you make of the Giants and A's being in the playoffs?
Lamott: It's great. I'm so stoked. I love the Giants. I love the A's
—I think you can't live in the Bay area and not love the A's, so I think
it's great—but I want the Giants to win. I'm a Giants girl. Some of my
first memories are being in the kitchen in our old house, coming in with my
older brother and my Mom sitting by the radio. Willie Mays would be up. God,
it was just so exciting. It's in my DNA to be a Giants fan, but I do love the
A's. If it were just the A's, I'd be passionately for them.
Dave: People coming to your books nowadays or to your Salon columns
probably wouldn't guess that as a teenager you were part of the top-ranked doubles
tennis team in Northern California.
Lamott: I was a real player.
Dave: At what age did you begin playing?
Lamott: Very young. I think I started playing at our tennis club, the
rec center in town, at about nine. I took some lessons, but it caught on immediately.
I was very athletic. I had a flare for it. I would never get off the courts
after that. I started playing tournaments when I was ten. Then I played twelve-and-under
all the way through sixteen-and-under, and I think we were ranked number one
a lot of those years.
I was always better at doubles than singles.
I've always liked doing frightening things with other people.
Dave: Is Sam an athlete?
Lamott: He's not an organized athlete, but he's extremely athletic
and wiry. He has the same athletic gift that I did, which is that we were both
wiry and tensile and strong. I was very thin; he's very thin.
He's wrestling right now, which is perfect because he's really cagey. He plays
tennis, but I erred on the side of not getting him involved in competitive sports.
They play soccer at school, but I never encouraged it.
Dave: Through their younger years, Calvin
Trillin often wrote about his kids. Around the time they reached middle
school, he stopped. He decided not to write about them again at least until
they were through their teens. Those years, he figured, are too difficult without
being the subject of your father's humor columns. Do you feel the same way?
Lamott: I do. I've written a few pieces about Sam at Salon, but we've
had the discussion and he really doesn't want to be written about. But he also
said I could publish all those older pieces; I'll be putting them together in
another kind of Traveling Mercies. But I won't be writing about him.
People say, "Write an Operating Instructions for teenagers," but I agree
with Calvin Trillin.
Dave: Read any good books lately?
Lamott: I loved the Paul
Theroux book, Dark
Star Safari, about his walk from Cairo to Capetown. And I loved the new
T. C. Boyle novel, Drop
City. Those are my two favorites lately.
Dave: Are you working on more fiction now?
Lamott: No, I'm just doing Salon. I'm doing these spiritual pieces
and a lot of political activism. I got arrested a lot in the spring, protesting
the war, and I'm registering voters now, first for the gubernatorial election
that we're having soon, but I'll keep doing it through the Presidential election.
I can't do both at once, fiction and the other. Whenever I've quit Salon,
it's because I can't do both at once. A novel takes ferocious concentration.
It's a very jealous mistress; it doesn't give me permission to be writing. I
have two thousand words due every two weeks at Salon, and each piece takes a
full week. So that's what I'm doing: trying to bring down this government and
bring another collection together.
Dave: Well, let's pretend for the sake of argument that we get a government
you can live with...
Lamott: I think we will.
Dave: But it's interesting to gauge public sentiment in different parts
of the country. For instance, in Portland, where Ralph
Nader collected more votes than anywhere else, we're definitely not representative
of the mainstream. It's easy to forget that if you don't get out of town. When
I went to the Midwest in April, it was such an eye-opening experience to see
all those Bush bumper stickers and signs on front lawns. Then just a few weeks
ago I was in New York City visiting a friend who didn't think the economy seemed
so bad. He's a teacher, so he doesn't make a ton of money, but he gets by and
he likes the work.
People are always complaining that TV and mass media are washing out the regional
differences in America, but we're still creatures of our immediate surroundings.
When you travel, how much do you see on the road?
Lamott: Well, I'll go to Portland and Seattle, and I'll be in Boulder
tomorrow—they're all liberal cities. I went to New York, Washington:
liberal cities. And the people come to see me sure are. I'm in Chicago, Milwaukee,
Madison—they're all liberal, union cities. I mean, I guess Milwaukee
is sort of northern heartland, but I wasn't really in the heartland.
Iowa, that's about it. I don't travel much for my tours anymore because I really
just want to be at home.
Dave: If you had another existence, if you had more time, is there
something out there...
Lamott: If I had more time, it would be a nightmare for me. I don't
want more time. I have the right amount of time. I err on the side of sloth.
I'm ferocious about protecting my time.
I spend almost all my time alone. I see my son a lot, of course; I see my
boyfriend; and I'm very involved in my church; but I spend about eighty percent
of every day alone. I have a very domestic life. I have a house to keep together,
and a one-year-old dog, and a cat. And I'm tired. I'm almost fifty, and I'm
not a good sleeper. I take a little nap every afternoon. I believe that sleep
and rest and self-care are radical acts. So I'm not racing around trying to
get Sam from one lesson to another; no, I'm actually ferocious about this. I
don't need more time.
I've written a lot about the fact that I find life exhausting and confusing;
a lot of the time, I feel wonder and fascination—things are sort of funny
and sweet—but a lot of the time they're just harder than anyone could
have ever imagined. It's been excruciating for me to be living under George
Bush and to watch this world—and my son's world—be devastated
in the way that it has under his rule. I do what I can do. I spend a couple
hours a week registering people. But I seize whatever time I can and I commit
it to doing nothing. There's nothing else I'm good at. There's nothing else
I want to do. I do a lot of missionary work, in the Christian sense: I visit
sick people and I am on the phone with people, I send out a lot of cards. I
pray. I just find the days are pretty long as they are. I'm glad when the light
goes down.
Dave: Where do you get your news?
Lamott: I read Salon
every day. It's thirty-five dollars a year for a subscription. You can read
the beginnings of every article there for free, but to read them whole you have
to subscribe. I'm not just making a plug for it; I actually find great writing
there. Jake
Tapper and Joe
Conason, and Arianna
was there until she entered the gubernatorial race. And Joan Walsh. So many
people I trust. I love the liberal columnists in the New York Times.
I turn to them. I read the Washington Post online a lot of nights; it's
gotten so good in the last six months. It's just really happening. I read The
Nation.
I talk to my friends a lot. We're in constant communication about what's going
on and what it means and where we should lean a little harder, where we should
send our money. I send money to a lot of candidates because at this point I
don't know who I'm going to vote for. I send money to Ms. Barbara Lee, who
does speak for me; she's the radical Oakland congresswoman who was the only
person not to sign the War Powers Act after 9/11. And I love the Chronicle;
it's sort of like the nice little aunt I've gotten used to over the years. Some
of the writing in there is pretty good; Jon
Carroll is fantastic.
Anne Lamott
visited Powell's City of Books on September 26, 2003.
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