Addiction, motherhood and Jesus with writer Anne Lamott

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Interview with Anne Lamott

0:53I'm Manoush Zomorodi. In Northern California in the 50s and early 60s, all fourth graders had to write their first research paper. And you have a whole semester to do it. One semester was about Sacramento, our capital, and one semester was about birds. This is best-selling author Anne Lamott. So my older brother, who did not like school and was very bitter about any homework he was asked to do, had not started it.

1:23He'd had the whole semester, and it was due that Monday. So we were out at this one-room cabin we had on the coast, and my dad was trying to help him. And they had photos of birds. They had the National Geographic. They had Roger Torrey-Peterson and Audubon. But my brother was crying because it was just such a daunting project. And my dad sat down next to him and put his arm around him and said, Just take it bird by bird, buddy.

Bird by Bird Story

1:52Even though Anne was just nine years old at the time, her father's words stuck with her. That was the best writing advice I've ever heard, that you study about chickadees, and then you write about them for a little bit in your own voice. Then you illustrate them. Then you think about great blue herons, and you read what Audubon has to say, and then you put it in your own words. And you've really turned that into a metaphor for starting so many things in our lives. Everything. I mean, the American way is that you should always know what you're doing.

2:24You've made a decision, and you should stick with it. But the fact is that no writer knows what they're doing until they've done it. The way that you get to the miracle of writing is bird by bird. If you know Anne Lamott, you've heard this story before. If you don't, it's a great introduction to her, because that phrase, bird by bird, is also the title of one of her best-known books. Anne is the author of more than 20 books,

2:55mostly filled with her own memories of family, single parenting, addiction, faith, and forgiveness. For over 40 years, her work has touched a nerve with so many people who turn to her for wisdom and advice on how to write, but also just how to live. And so today on the show, an hour with Anne Lamott.

Conversation with Anne Lamott

3:17We spoke in 2024 as she marked her 70th birthday, and this conversation remains one of my favorites. You'll hear lessons from her life and ideas from her latest essay collection, which is called Somehow, Thoughts on Love. But first, we need to go back to Bird by Bird, her bestseller that came out about 30 years ago. On the very first page, she begins with a description of her earliest memories. I grew up around a father and mother who read every chance they got,

3:50who took us to the library every Thursday night to load up on books for the coming week. Most nights after dinner, my father stretched out on the couch to read, while my mother sat with her book in the easy chair, and the three of us kids each retired to our own private reading stations. Our house was very quiet after dinner, unless, that is, some of my father's writer friends were over. My father was a writer, as were most of the men with whom he hung out.

Anne Lamott's Writing Process

4:18They were not the quietest people on earth, but they were mostly very masculine and kind. I loved them, but every so often one of them would pass out at the dinner table. I was an anxious child to begin with, and I found this unnerving. I love this because it's such a California scene in some ways, but it's also, you know, you say you were anxious, you were an anxious child to begin with. How did that manifest itself?

4:48What were you like? Well, first of all, my parents were very, very unhappy together, and so I was on red alert a lot of the time because I didn't want to walk into any traps. I had migraines by the time I was five, so I think that would indicate that there was an issue. And then not long after, my mom had my baby brother, and I just felt really positive that I had to help raise him because my parents were so preoccupied and so out of their league

5:23in terms of trying to keep their marriage together. My dad was a writer, so he was trying to keep the family together financially. There was so much going on, so I took on raising the baby brother at five years and 40 pounds or whatever, and that did not reduce my anxiety. You worried about him a lot. I worried about him a lot.

Addiction and Recovery

5:43I thought about him dying all the time because people weren't paying attention, and I had terrible dreams of him drowning. I mean, I can still vividly remember a dream, and I think I'm six or seven, and I can remember the details of the trees of this dream I dreamt when my younger brother was just a little one. Do you remember when you started to realize that the observation, the vividness of dreams, the remembering of small, small details,

6:13that they were all fodder for writing? Was that from the beginning just because of your dad encouraging you to do that, or was there a moment where you're like, oh, look at me. I'm actually really good at this. That's a good question. I think it really molded me into a person who had a lot of fear about whether or not the world was even safe. The world never felt safe to me from kindergarten on because I got bullied so much, and I responded by getting a sense of humor. I did discover that the best way to fight back

6:45was to come up with the right retort. And then I went to college when I was 17 and dropped out when I was 19 at the end of my sophomore year, and I was writing little pieces for the college paper. I went to Goucher College in Maryland, and I just wrote about being young women at this feminist college coming into our own, and they were pretty funny. And so, you know, I understood that if I wrote this way, people liked it. You got a book deal in your early 20s, right?

7:18Your first one? For Hard Laughter, my first novel. And that was about your father's death.

Faith and Spirituality

7:23And I think what strikes people also so much about your writing is how shockingly honest you are about your life. Did you feel like this is just me on the page? Were you writing for the reader, or were you writing for yourself? Well, my father got sick with a metastasized melanoma in his brain when I was 23, and he was still the center of our family. My brothers and I just adored him. He was like our higher power. And he got sick, and he wasn't going to live. And I went to the library, and I looked everywhere

7:55and talked to the research librarians for books about families coming through cancer, and it just wasn't there. This is 1977. You didn't say the word cancer. That's why in Hard Laughter, my dad and our really dear friend Susan liked to sit around at the cafe in Bolinas, and they'd say the word cancer really loudly to each other to make people uncomfortable. Dad would say, well, Susan, how is your cancer today? And she'd say, well, Ken, my cancer is not as bad as I think it was just last week.

8:26How is your cancer? And so I started writing a book that might be helpful to people in whose family there was somebody with a really significant kind of cancer. And people, I mean, the book didn't, it sold 3,500 copies in hardback. It wasn't a big seller, but people came up to me. I got the kind of feedback that made me think, wow, when I tell these stories that you're not supposed

8:56to say out loud, it's a gift to people who are going through that same sort of thing. Can we talk about your literal process of writing? There's a passage, again, in Bird by Bird that I'd be so grateful if you read for us. Sure. It's on page 54.

9:15This is how it works for me. I sit down in the morning and reread the work I did the day before. And then I wool gather, staring at the blank page or off into space. I imagine my characters and let myself daydream about them. A movie begins to play in my head, with emotion pulsing underneath it. And I stare at it in a trance-like state until words bounce around together and form a sentence. Then I do the menial work of getting it down on paper

9:46because I'm the designated typist. And I'm also the person whose job it is to hold the lantern while the kid does the digging. What is the kid digging for? The stuff. Details and clues and images, invention, fresh ideas, and intuitive understanding of people. I tell you, the holder of the lantern doesn't even know what the kid is digging for half the time. But she knows gold when she sees it. Is that still your process, would you say?

10:17Yeah. I'm just writing a piece today, and it is exactly that process. That you have an idea, I have people that I'm writing about, and I stare off into space, and then some words start bouncing around, and then I just keep doing this paragraph by paragraph, and I dig around, and then all of a sudden I might, on a good day, have an insight about humankind. And then I think of a funny little story that just happened that I want to remember,

10:47and I get that done. I always have paper with me, and I always have a pen, and almost all of my genes have little dots of ink in the back pocket, and you just have to live with that.

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10:58There was a point where people started asking you for advice about how to write, and that is the book, Bird by Bird. I'd like to play, actually, some of the advice that you put into that book that you also shared in your TED Talk about the act of writing. If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

11:36You're going to feel like hell if you wake up some day and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart, your stories, memories, visions, and songs, your truth, your version of things, in your own voice. That's really all you have to offer us.

11:57Publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt, damage, and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and evil people I've ever known are male writers who've had huge bestsellers. And yet, it's also a miracle to get your work published, to get your stories read and heard. Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you,

12:29that it will fill the Swiss cheesy holes inside of you. It can't, it won't, but writing can. So can singing in a choir or a bluegrass band. So can painting community murals or birding or fostering old dogs that no one else will. It really is like monk's work. You know, you sit down in a little cell, turn off the outside world, go deeply inside, and you do your work.

13:00No one's making you write. No one cares if you write. So you better. In a moment, Anne Lamott guides us through more of her life's work, her writings on addiction, faith, and parenthood. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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Continuation of Interview

15:23Okay, back to the show. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And we are spending this hour with the very wise and very funny best-selling author and TED speaker, Anne Lamott. Anne's 20th book is called Somehow, Thoughts on Love. It's full of essays about the various shapes that love can take and some of the hardest things people need to go through to attain it.

15:53Anne, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here. So you have written extensively about your experience with addiction, about learning to forgive yourself, to care for yourself. For people who maybe haven't read along in that journey, tell us about when and how that started your addiction and when it started to heal. I think I just came this way, you know.

16:27I think I just had and have a very addictive personality. I can remember being on rope swings with my girlfriends when I was really young, swinging, you know, spinning around, spinning around. And the girls would stop before they got dizzy and I would want to keep going. And I would love to get off that rope swing and then stagger around drunkenly. And then, as I said, I was, you know, I was shy and I was very bullied. And I remember the first time I chugged a beer

16:57with my really, my best friend, Lisa Kampmeyer. And she'd gotten a couple beers out of her father's little fridge in the man cave. And we chugged them and the whole world sprang into color like in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door into Oz. And I could breathe again and I felt pretty and I felt happy and I was so much less self-conscious and I just felt like, let me at it, you know. And I sort of, for the rest of my life, the next 20 years,

17:28I just chased down that feeling of feeling pretty and whole and fully alive. And, of course, it's kind of a cliche, but what happens is there's three parts. There's the really fun stage of alcoholism, or addiction and it's just a gas, you know. And then there's the fun and trouble stage where it's happening too often and you're sick in the mornings and you're embarrassing yourself or making people mad at you or making bigger and bigger mistakes. And then there's the trouble stage

17:58and you're waking up pretty consistently really sick and confused or I would wake up in this animal disorientation of where am I? Why did I do that? What did I do? Having to call around to people to see how the night before had gone. But I didn't let that stop me for a long time. And then finally, July 7th, 1986, I woke up and I just had this feeling. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and I reached out

18:29to a sober friend I knew, an older man, and I said, I think I'm done. Did it surprise you? Did you surprise yourself? No. I'd known I was an alcoholic since my early 20s. You know, everyone in my family drinks, both of my brothers were alcoholics. All three of us have 37 plus years clean and sober. My dad drank a lot, all of our family friends. And so it was fine. It was like, it just meant that you were sort of a bon vivant and you laughed about the hangovers and you laughed about, oh, I'm such a lush.

19:00And boy, it becomes unfunny and it's unfunny when you're alone with yourself and you have to come face to face with what it's doing to your soul.

19:11In your new book, which is called Somehow, Thoughts on Love, you write about what a man who was also in recovery told you. Would you mind reading that passage for us? When I first got sober, a man told me that upon waking every morning, instead of reciting the standard flowery recovery prayer, he said, whatever. And at night, when he turned off his light to go to sleep, he said, oh, well.

19:41In between, he practiced simplicity. He stayed sober, worked on acceptance, tried to be of service to others, went for nature walks, picked up litter, made himself tea and called it a day. This is a perfect plan for living. My way, trying to nudge life and people into submission with my sensitivity and excellent ideas leaves me exhausted. The antidote is to surrender, lay down my sorry weapons and step over to the winning side of friends,

20:12service, and fresh air. I opened the windows. I savor the fresh air whenever I remember to open them. The fresh air breathes the whole house. Tell me about this philosophy. Is it like the thing where you're trying so hard to get that job of your dreams and the minute you stop caring, that's when you get the offer? That kind of thing? Well, it's not when you stop caring because that might not ever happen, but for me, it's when I unclench

20:43my grip on it and when I start to release and I start to breathe again and I just have faith that whatever is supposed to happen is going to happen because it's the only thing that can happen a lot of the time. It's when I release it and stop, you know, breathing my hot breath down its neck that I often get what I had hoped for. Do you think that that's very American as well? This idea that like

21:14you just barrel through and if you just knuckle down and want it hard enough and work hard enough you can get whatever you want. Oh, definitely. That's how I was raised. I call it forward thrust is that you must always be advancing and on the path of success. In fact, I've written a lot about how part of the reason our parents taught us that way of life was because it would keep you from falling in the abyss which might otherwise open up at your feet. Now, the abyss is where

21:44almost everything I've learned that's really, really important about myself and about life has been found but everything in my family was about pretending there is no abyss and that you just have to walk fast enough and you'll be able to outrun it and so with my students, with my son, with my grandson, I really encourage people to notice the forward thrust and that it really didn't serve them. Maybe it got them into the school

22:15they wanted to get into but now they've got the rest of their lives to live and how are they going to live those precious, precious years and it starts to occur to you that A, it never really worked, you know, the forward thrust that it didn't fill you up and B, it really hurt you and a lot of people along the way. Can we turn the conversation to God, please? Because you are a devout

22:46Christian, you often write about your belief, you are a Sunday school teacher, but you did not grow up that way. How did faith enter your life? Oh, well that's a great question, I love it. My parents were devout atheists but they were also devout liberal activists and I end up being a believer who's also a devout activist so I don't want your listeners to get the idea that I'm like the stereotype of a Christian

23:16in America. It's like Gandhi said, I love Christ but I just am worried about the Christians and I feel exactly the same way but I always believed. It's funny because I just had this thirst inside of me and because I was such a frightened child and an insomniac and had these migraines when I got in bed I somehow knew don't ask me how that if I said in silence hello something heard me and I wasn't alone.

23:49When I was in college I took a lot of religion and I took a lot of philosophy and I can remember the day and I've written about it when I made the decision to be a seeker to be a person who tried to find a faith for herself and I was 18 years old I just started my sophomore year and we were reading Kierkegaard in a philosophy class Fear and Trembling and it's such a wild piece of writing because it's about like the least lovely piece of the whole Bible

24:20when God tells Abraham to take Isaac his precious young boy up to the mountain and sacrifice him and he goes up there and of course the angels meet him and say well God has provided a lamb in the thicket and Abraham goes back home to Isaac but the teacher talked about the leap of faith that Abraham made in that moment that he decides for faith instead of what he is positive would be the right and just thing to do and I made the leap of faith that day it's very mysterious

24:51to me but I understood in that moment how bleak and scary and dreary life was going to be if I just didn't find something to connect to that was bigger than my own rattled pinball brain and that was when my search began and I studied everything I could and I found this kind of consignment store faith that was very very ecumenical but I prayed all the time I just prayed to feel like I get to be here and that I'm a person of value

25:22whether or not the world or the current boyfriend saw me that way and that I prayed for peace and I didn't become a Christian I mean I really resisted it oh I really resisted it and then one day I just surrendered you know I was drunk you were drunk yeah yeah it was the year before I got sober it was 1985 and I had been staggering over to this flea market on Sunday mornings when I was at my most hungover and I had staggered into

25:52this crummy little church with a Charlie Brown tree outside and I was hearing some of the old songs of the civil rights movement that my parents had been very involved in that were also gospel songs from the deep south and I never stayed for the Jesus he parts this sermon but I loved the singing and the people never hassled me or tried to get me to sign on to bible study or try to figure out who shot the holy ghost they just could see that I was in pretty desperate straights and they got me tea

26:22and they gave me hugs and I left and then I stopped leaving and then I stayed when did you decide to come out as a religious person I wondered if you worried about that and whether you've ever felt the need to censor yourself for you know you appeal to a progressive liberal audience which is generally not religious a lot of people though in my audience are people who ran screaming from their cute little lives as children and fundamentalist Christian families

26:54who didn't think that there could be a place in the greater body for someone like them who was maybe gay or who was just a free spirit and who didn't buy the doctrine and didn't buy the harshness of fundamentalist Christianity but so I got sober and then I started writing a book that ended up being called Operating Instructions a journal of my son's first year and that was when I overtly came out as a believer and someone who went

27:24to church and prayed and did the did the work In your TED Talk you talk about faith in a way that appeals to me as someone who did not grow up with any religion and I find it very moving so let's listen Grace is spiritual WD-40 or water wings the mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin

27:54and me exactly as much as he or she loves your new grandchild go figure the movement of grace is what changes us heals us and heals our world to summon grace say help and then buckle up grace finds you exactly where you are but it doesn't leave you where it found you and grace won't look like Casper the friendly ghost regrettably but the phone will ring or the mail

28:24will come and then against all odds you'll get your sense of humor about yourself back laughter really is carbonated holiness it helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves and this gives us faith in life and each other and remember grace always bats last God just means goodness it's really not all that scary it means the divine

28:55or a loving animating intelligence or as we learned from the great deteriorata the cosmic muffin a good name for God is not me Emerson said that the happiest person on earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship so go outside a lot and look up every time it's the reset button get outside you look up and it it starts

29:25everything over again as you mentioned a few years after you got sober you became pregnant with your son Sam he's now in his 30s at the time you were unmarried and you know the the biological father didn't want to have any part of it but you decided to go forward as a single mother and you turned the experience that first year as a single mother into the book operating instructions this book

29:57means a lot to me because when I had my first child I was looking for a book just like you were looking for the book about cancer that told the truth I was looking for a book about parenting and what it was really like and there was really at the time not that much out there and I found your book and you I felt just seen thank thank you yeah well it wasn't out there it just wasn't that a mother or a

30:27parent was writing about how bored you can be with an infant and how exhausting it is all the time how ambivalent you feel I had a colicky infant and no money there's a line in the book that said oh god now he's raised his ugly reptilian head and no mother had ever said that before and there was a there's a line in the book about casually thinking about bundling him up really well and putting him in a basket

30:57outside for the night so I could get one night's sleep and get a second wind and it just wasn't out there and so I wrote it as a love story that some days you could die of love you could literally pass out from the love you feel for this tiny creature and other days are just too long throughout his childhood Sam makes appearances in your books but he

31:28had his own troubles as an adult can you tell us about how you and Sam proceeded into his young adulthood together and what he faced he got very lost at about 14