Pod Insights TED Radio Hour Addiction, motherhood, and Jesus with writer Anne Lamott About this episode Writer Anne Lamott has garnered a cult following with her shockingly honest prose on love, death, faith, writing and more. This hour, her wisdom from a career that has spanned 20 books and 40 years.
Original broadcast date: April 5, 2024.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:24 Speaker 01 Our job now is to dream big.
0:25 Manoush Zomorodi? Delivered at TED conferences.
0:27 Speaker 02 To bring about the future we want to see.
0:29 Manoush Zomorodi? Around the world.
0:30 Speaker 03 To understand who we are.
0:32 Manoush Zomorodi? From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
0:37 Speaker 04 You just don't know what you're gonna find.
0:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Challenge you.
0:40 Speaker 05 We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?
0:42 Manoush Zomorodi? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi.
0:57 Speaker 06 In Northern California in the 50s and early 60s, all 4th 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.
1:14 Manoush Zomorodi? This is bestselling author Anne Lamott.
1:17 Speaker 06 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. He'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 Torey 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."
1:55 Manoush Zomorodi? Even though Anne was just nine years old at the time, her father's words stuck with her.
2:01 Speaker 06 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 grapefruit herons and you read what Audubon has to say and then you put it in your own words.
2:16 Manoush Zomorodi? And you've really turned that into a metaphor for starting so many things in our lives.
2:21 Speaker 06 Everything. I mean, the American way is that you should always know what you're doing. You'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 that, to the miracle of writing is bird by bird.
2:40 Manoush Zomorodi? 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 now the author of 20 books, mostly 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 how to live. And so today on the show, an hour with Anne Lamott as she marks her 70th birthday,
3:24 Manoush Zomorodi? lessons from her life, and more reflections on the art of writing. Her newest book 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.
3:47 Speaker 06 I grew up around a father and mother who read every chance they got, who 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. They 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.
4:30 Speaker 06 I was an anxious child to begin with, and I found this unnerving.
4:35 Manoush Zomorodi? 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? What were you like?
4:52 Speaker 06 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 in 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
5:36 Speaker 06 or whatever. And that did not reduce my anxiety.
5:41 Manoush Zomorodi? You worried about him a lot.
5:43 Speaker 06 I worried about him a lot. I 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.
6:06 Manoush Zomorodi? Do you remember when you started to realize that the observation, the vividness of dreams, the remembering of small, small details, that 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?
6:26 Speaker 06 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 was 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.
7:10 Speaker 06 And so, you know, I understood that if I wrote this way, people liked it.
7:16 Manoush Zomorodi? You got a book deal in your early twenties, right? Your first one?
7:20 Speaker 06 Uh huh. For Hard Laughter, my first novel.
7:22 Manoush Zomorodi? And that was about your father's death. And 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?
7:38 Speaker 06 Well, my father got sick with 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 and 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 café in Bolinas and they'd say the word cancer. Really loudly to each other to make people uncomfortable. Dad would say, well, Susan, how was your cancer today?
8:22 Speaker 06 And she'd say, well, Ken, my cancer is not as bad as I think it was just last week. How was 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 this, these stories that you're not supposed to say out loud, it's a gift to people who are going through that same sort of thing.
9:05 Manoush Zomorodi? 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.
9:13 Speaker 06 Sure.
9:13 Manoush Zomorodi? It's on page 54.
9:17 Speaker 06 This 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 because 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?
9:59 Speaker 06 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.
10:16 Manoush Zomorodi? Is that still your process, would you say?
10:18 Speaker 06 Yeah. 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. And I get that done. I always have paper with me, and I always have a pen. And almost all of my jeans have little dots of ink in the back pocket. And you just have to live with that.
11:00 Manoush Zomorodi? There 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.
11:19 Speaker 06 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.
11:38 Speaker 06 You're going to feel like hell if you wake up someday 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. Publication 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.
12:20 Speaker 06 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, that 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. No one's making you write. No one cares if you write, so you better.
13:07 Manoush Zomorodi? In a moment, Anne Lamott guides us through more of her life's work, her writings on addiction, faith, and parenthood. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.
13:30 Manoush Zomorodi? Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts. They use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season, from joy rides, campfire cheers, or peak views. REI knows what to give the people you love, who love to get out there, because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For the best gifts out there, shop in-store or at REI.com.
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14:36 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. And we are spending this hour with the very wise and very funny bestselling 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. Anne, thank you so much for being here.
15:06 Speaker 06 Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here.
15:09 Manoush Zomorodi? 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.
15:34 Speaker 06 I think I just came this way, you know? I 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, shy and I was very bullied. And I remember the first time I chugged a beer with my really, my best friend, Lisa Campmeyer. And she'd gotten a couple beers out of her father's
16:14 Speaker 06 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, I 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?
16:57 Speaker 06 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 and 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 to a sober friend I knew, an older man.
17:43 Speaker 06 And I said, I think I'm done.
17:45 Manoush Zomorodi? Did it surprise you? Did you surprise yourself?
17:47 Speaker 06 No, I'd known I was an alcoholic since my early twenties. You know, everyone in my family drinks. Both of my brothers were alcoholics. They, all three of us have 37 plus years, clean and sober. My dad drank a lot, all of our family drank. 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. And 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.
18:21 Manoush Zomorodi? In 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?
18:35 Speaker 06 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. In 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.
19:16 Speaker 06 The antidote is to surrender, lay down my sorry weapons, and step over to the winning side of friends, service, and fresh air. I open the windows, I savor the fresh air whenever I remember to open them, the fresh air breathes the whole house.
19:34 Manoush Zomorodi? 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?
19:45 Speaker 06 Well, it's not when you stop caring, because that might not ever happen, but for me, it's when I unclench my 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 breathing my hot breath down its neck, that I often get what I had hoped for.
20:20 Manoush Zomorodi? Do you think that that's very American as well? This idea that you just barrel through, and if you just knuckle down and want it hard enough and work hard enough, you could get whatever you want?
20:31 Speaker 06 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 almost 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...
21:18 Speaker 06 I really encourage people to notice the forward thrust and that it really didn't serve them. Maybe it got them into the school they wanted to get into, but now they've got the rest of their lives to live and how are they going to live those, 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.
21:51 Manoush Zomorodi? Can we turn the conversation to God, please? Because you are a devout Christian, 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?
22:08 Speaker 06 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 in 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, I somehow knew, don't
22:51 Speaker 06 ask me how, that if I said in silence, hello, something heard me. And I wasn't alone. When 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 eighteen years old. I had 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 when God tells Abraham to take Isaac,
23:33 Speaker 06 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 to 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.
24:17 Speaker 06 I studied everything I could and I, you know, 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, whether 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.
24:49 Manoush Zomorodi? You were drunk?
24:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah. It was the year before I got sober. It was nineteen eighty-five. 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 this 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-y parts, the 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 straits and they got me tea. And they gave me hugs and I left.
25:36 Speaker 06 And then I stopped leaving and then I stayed.
25:38 Manoush Zomorodi? 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.
25:54 Speaker 06 Uh huh. A lot of people, though, in my audience are people who ran screaming from their cute little lives as children in fundamentalist Christian families, who 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, um, 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 to church and prayed and did the work.
26:40 Manoush Zomorodi? 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.
26:54 Speaker 06 Grace is spiritual WD-40 or water wings. The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as he or she loves your new grandchild. Go figure.
27:14 Speaker 06 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 will 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.
28:00 Speaker 06 God just means goodness. It's really not all that scary. It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence. Or as we learn 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 starts everything over again.
28:38 Manoush Zomorodi? 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 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 means 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.
29:23 Manoush Zomorodi? And there was really, at the time, not that much out there. And I found your book and you, I felt, just seen.
29:32 Speaker 06 Thank you. Yeah, well, it wasn't out there. It just wasn't that a mother or a parent 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 outside 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.
30:18 Speaker 06 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.
30:32 Manoush Zomorodi? Throughout his childhood, Sam makes appearances in your books. But he had 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?
30:50 Speaker 06 He got very lost at about 14 with drugs and alcohol. We live in a really druggie part of the world, Marin County. And I could just see that he was going down the elevator of addiction. You know, and the elevator only goes in one direction. We've always been very, very close. And it got to the point where I just thought he was going to die. And nine days before he graduated from high school, I mean, this is how scared I was. I sent him off to this recovery place in the highest peak of the Allegheny Mountains, 3,000 miles away.
31:30 Speaker 06 And he was there for a number of months and came back and was dealing by the next day. And how it happened was he had a baby when he was 19 and he was just a mess. He would agree. And I stopped letting him be a mess at our house with the baby. He and his baby mama and baby had been living in San Francisco and she and the baby had moved in with me. And I said to him, you can't be here when you're crazy. You can't be here if you're using or if you've been drinking. And I threw him off the property. And I set that boundary. And about 10 days later, he called and said that the guys in the recovery community
32:14 Speaker 06 in San Francisco had taken him under his wing and he had one week clean and sober. And now he has about, he's about to celebrate 13 years. So, I mean, we have been through it. We have been through the dark night of the soul. And those 13 years have not all been easy, but we found our way back into deep closeness and respect. And that is predicated on having released him to his own life.
32:42 Manoush Zomorodi? When we come back, Anne explains more about how we can accept that we can't always help the people we love. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
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33:12 Manoush Zomorodi? This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts. They use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season, from joyrides, campfire cheers, or peak views. REI knows what to give the people you love who love to get out there, because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For the best gifts out there, shop in-store or at REI.com.
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34:22 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. We're spending this hour with TED speaker and bestselling author Anne Lamott. Anne has written in-depth about overcoming her addictions and how she handled her son Sam's struggles with sobriety, too. These days, Anne says, readers often ask her, how can they help their loved ones? And Anne's response is, well, sometimes, you just can't. Here she is on the TED stage.
34:55 Speaker 06 This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it. But it's an inside job. And we can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world. They have to find their own ways, their own answers. You can't run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and chapstick on their hero's journey. You have to release them. It's disrespectful not to.
35:26 Speaker 06 And if it's someone else's problem, you probably don't have the answer anyway. Our help is usually not very helpful. Our help is often toxic. And help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much. Don't get your help and goodness all over everybody.
35:51 Manoush Zomorodi? It can be so hard to love someone so much and want to say something to them that you know they're going to not want to hear anyway. And sometimes we can't help ourselves. How do we? What do we do about that?
36:12 Speaker 06 Well, it's hard because most of us have this generosity in us. But there's also the insanity of thinking you can save and fix and rescue people, especially those who don't want to be saved or fixed or rescued. Like when Sam was sick, I came to feel that I had this rusted fish hook in my chest and it was connected by a fishing line to a rusted fishing hook in his chest. And I had the delusional belief that somehow that was keeping him afloat. And if I got it out of my own chest, he would sink and die.
36:53 Speaker 06 But that's a little bit crazy to think that you're that powerful over another adult. So at some point... And it really hurt. I jiggled the rusty fishing hook out of my chest and I waited to see what would happen and he floated, you know? And it's a very, very hard lesson to release somebody to what might be catastrophe or even death. And I had to accept at some point that my endless nagging and foisting my attentions on him was making everything worse. And I stopped doing it. I let him stay in jail overnight because I thought that if I fished him out, he was gonna die.
37:37 Speaker 06 And in fact, the bail bond officer said, "You're the first mother in Marin County who's ever said no." But I think that if I bailed him out, he might not still be here. I don't know.
37:49 Manoush Zomorodi? We have talked a lot this hour about how to live, how to work, how to parent, how to find joy, grace. And that brings us to another theme that you often visit, which is death. You are honest about it. You talk about your father's death, your best friend Pammy's death, and you talk about it in your TED Talk as well.
38:16 Speaker 06 It's so hard to bear when the few people you cannot live without die. You'll never get over these losses. And no matter what the culture says, you're not supposed to. We Christians like to think of death as a major change of address. But in any case, the person will live again fully in your heart if you don't seal it off. Like Leonard Cohen said, "There are cracks in everything, and that's how the light gets in. And that's how we feel, our people again, fully alive." But their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you. Grief and friends, time and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate and moisturize you in the ground
39:01 Speaker 06 on which you walk. When you're a little bit older, like my tiny, personal self, you realize that death is as sacred as birth. And don't worry, get on with your life. Almost every single death is easy and gentle with the very best people surrounding you. For as long as you need, you won't be alone. They'll help you cross over to whatever awaits us. As Ram Dass said, "When all is said and done, we're really just all walking each other home."
39:40 Manoush Zomorodi? You start by talking about how we deal with our loved ones' death, but then you talk about how we are inevitably going to have to face our own. Do you feel like people talk about that enough?
39:55 Speaker 06 Well, they talk a lot more than they used to. I mean, I don't think death really came out of the closet until the AIDS epidemic, you know? And then people were saying, "My brothers are dying, our sons are dying. It's really happening." It took that level of crisis and heartbreak for people to start saying, "People die, and we're going to stay with them, and we're going to be very transparent about our feelings about it." And our feelings about it are that it sucks and we hate it, and that we're not going anywhere. We're not going to leave them. And that response made one of the biggest differences in this country that I can think of,
40:36 Speaker 06 when people started being willing to talk about both the devastation and the ordinariness of death. I do think I've had a lot more exposure to death, and I've been there for a lot of people who were dying. And in fact, when I met my husband, Neil, in 2016, he was a hospice volunteer. And so we came together very easily in that realm, that we really weren't afraid of it, because we'd seen so many people dying, and that it had never been terrifying.
41:09 Manoush Zomorodi? You just mentioned your husband, Neil. You mentioned him a lot in your new book. What was it like being a newlywed for the first time in your 60s?
41:19 Speaker 06 Well, it was a surprise, I'll tell you that. Because it had never been, I mean, when I was younger and probably in my 30s, I'd always really hoped I would find my soulmate and we would be married. But it wasn't a huge pressure on me or a shame. And I was almost married a couple of times and I just thank God and all the saints that I didn't marry those two men. And then I met Neil after a year of being on Match.com, or actually, there's an offshoot of Match called Our Time, which is for older people. And I met him and we just, we just got each other, we just got it. And I knew I wanted to be with him, I knew that we could talk,
42:05 Speaker 06 keep the conversation going for the rest of our lives. And then one day, we were watching the US Open, this is funny. And, but our cat had just passed a couple of months ago, that's important to the story. And we were watching the US Open on TV and he said, "Can I ask you something?" And I said, "Oh, sure." And I put the mute on and I turned towards him and he said, "Will you marry me?" And it literally hadn't crossed my mind because we were so happy together. And so I looked at him because I was kind of in shock and I said, "Well, can we get another cat?" Because he's violently allergic to cats. And he said, "Okay." And I said, "All right, then, I can marry you." And then, and then we got married in April of that year,
42:48 Speaker 06 three days after I started getting social security.
42:52 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, the book somehow is not just about romantic love, it's about all kinds of different loves that we can experience. But you, you quote the poet William Blake, who said that, I think it's, "We are here to endure the beams of love." Can you tell me what that means to you?
43:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, thank you. Well, the book is actually hardly about romantic love, a little bit about my marriage, but it's really mostly about... The reality for most of us that despite our gravest character defects and peccadilloes and annoying ways and self-centeredness, we are just deeply loved. And it's scary, it can be scary if you weren't raised in a, in a family for whom that was the driving force, the, the awareness of the love energy around us and inside us and above us and in nature and still to come.
43:55 Speaker 06 It can be scary to be a person who loves recklessly and who allows people to love her. Blake says, "We're here to learn to endure the beams of love."
44:09 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
44:10 Speaker 06 Once you can endure it, I think it goes without saying that little by little, you will look for it and welcome it.
44:19 Manoush Zomorodi? I wonder if I could ask you to read one last passage from Somehow. It kind of touches on all the themes that you write about in your body of work and that we've talked about this hour. It's a dream that you had one night when you and Neil were on a trip, a vacation in Havana. It's a dream about your father's girlfriend and it's, it's intense, but I wonder, could you read us that story?
44:47 Speaker 06 "I was walking in the fog, afraid. The fog is concealing the house where my father lives with his last girlfriend, whom we'll call Bev. Bev and my brothers and I were, let's say, not made for each other. It was a miserable situation for her. She and my dad started dating and four months later, he had brain cancer. He moved in with her and she took care of him for almost two years, until one day she asked him to leave, when he was at the mental level of a five-year-old, barely mobile, showed him to the road outside their house and called me to come get him. She had reached her limits. This I understood, but did not forgive. He was in his bathrobe."
45:32 Speaker 06 My nineteen-year-old brother and I took care of Dad the last five months of his life in our one-room family cabin. Bev was there every day helping, and we did the best we could. We were loving and polite with each other. It was profound and beautiful, and it sucked. There was subterfuge that I won't go into here. And after he died, she spirited away the one thing he left behind, besides us, which was a magnificent jazz record collection. I won't take her inventory here, except to say that if Bev had been a contestant on this radio show I've invented called "Why They Hate You," the panel would have focused on how she viewed her frequently expressed opinions on all of life as revealed truths.
46:17 Speaker 06 We almost never saw her or spoke again after Dad died. In the dream, Dad appeared through the fog and said that Bev didn't want me to see him for a while because I always made everything worse. Then Bev stepped forth, holding a gun, and stood beside him. It turned out I had a gun, too. I've never even touched one in real life. I'm pretty sure that if I so much as held one, I would end up shooting off my foot. But the dream involved us chasing each other down. Shots were fired. I was prepared to kill her. But then she sat down in a corner, heaving for breath. I didn't quite know what to do, which is one, historically, I have experienced, the
47:02 Speaker 06 movement of grace in my life. She sat with her knees pulled to her chest. She looked defeated, and she looked at me adoringly. I thought about shooting her. Instead, I slowly, slowly bent down to my knees and cradled her. I said, "I love you. My family can never thank you enough." I stroked her head like a mother or a worried young daughter. I woke up on my bed in the hot room in Havana in shock. Bev, really? But wait, if you believe Carl Jung, everyone in a dream is us. So this dream about a bossy, greedy person who took the only thing of value my father owned,
47:47 Speaker 06 his records, this prideful woman who thought she was always right and always doing the right thing, was me, darling, evolved me. I was Bev, and I was the armed and furious Annie who stamped her foot and said, "He's mine," in the universal illusion, "I'm doing the right thing." The dream was saying to me, "Here's the letter, read it." The letter was leftover pain and anger, hidden way deep inside, so I couldn't hear it banging along beside me like tin cans tied to a wedding car. I couldn't get the letter till my defenses were down. Bev had loved my father, and he had loved her.
48:32 Speaker 06 They must have cried together so often. I realized stupidly that she had loved me too. I hadn't really noticed it in the fog of brain cancer, our anger, the daily grief and confusion toward the end. She had fed me, sometimes enjoyed me, put up with my drunkenness and jealousy. The letter was love. Love wears all these clothes, and it's hard to see through all those jackets, because love is territorial, love is anxious and burdened. Rarely can we get a gust of pure love, but I got one in Cuba from the single last place I ever expected to find it.
49:17 Manoush Zomorodi? What a gift that dream was to you.
49:21 Speaker 06 Life-changing.
49:22 Manoush Zomorodi? Really?
49:22 Speaker 06 Well, because there'd been this hard place in my heart for Bev, even though it had been 40 years, 45 years, and that place feels just so softened. And that's the most wonderful feeling of all.
49:37 Manoush Zomorodi? Forty, forty-five years, as you just said, that you've been writing. And the week that this episode comes out, it's Anne Lamott's birthday. You are turning seventy.
49:49 Speaker 06 Yeah.
49:49 Manoush Zomorodi? Does it feel like a big birthday?
49:52 Speaker 06 It does feel like a big birthday. I mean, sixty-nine is so much younger than seventy. But I've been practicing saying it. And all the people I know that are in their seventies and eighties are having really great lives, but, you know, it comes with a price. There's aches and pains and loss and some cognitive decline and whatnot. But I'm not worried about being older. But seventy does sound kind of dramatic to me. Eesh.
50:23 Manoush Zomorodi? Are you working on the next book? I can only assume.
50:26 Speaker 06 No.
50:27 Manoush Zomorodi? No?
50:28 Speaker 06 No, I'm not. I never am working on another book until the last one comes out. And I don't have a clue what I would write. This somehow is really every single thing I know about anything. And that includes what may, I hope, be helpful for my son and grandson when I'm gone. And I don't know what else I have left to share, but probably something will float into my head or tug on my sleeve and announce that it wants me to be its typist. And I'll think about that for a while. And I'm probably stuck having to write some more because I'm a writer.
51:10 Manoush Zomorodi? Anne Lamott, you certainly are. Thank you so much for spending the hour with us. We really appreciate it.
51:15 Speaker 06 Thank you so much.
51:17 Manoush Zomorodi? Anne Lamott's new book is called Somehow: Thoughts on Love. And you can see her full TED Talk at ted.com. Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. It was produced by Rachel Faulkner White and edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussaye, Harsha Nahada, Katie Monteleone, Matthew Cloutier, and Fiona Guren. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineer was David Greenberg. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezzo.
51:58 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
52:11 Manoush Zomorodi? Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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