Author helps us make sense of the world
When I told people I would be interviewing Anne Lamott as part of the tour for her latest book, “Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage,” I heard, over and over, a variation of the following:
“Anne got me through chemo.”
“Anne carried me through my son’s suicide.”
“Anne helped me get sober.”
Anne saved me. Anne saved me. Anne saved me.
Lamott is the author of seven novels and numerous nonfiction bestsellers, including “Operating Instructions,” an account of her life as a single mother during her son’s first year, and “Bird by Bird,” her 1994 writing manual that deserves a Pulitzer, to my mind, for the chapter called “Lousy First Drafts” alone. (Except instead of “Lousy” she uses a more evocative word I’m not allowed to print.)
Lamott also writes collections of autobiographical essays, including “Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy” and “Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.” Her writing is informed by her faith, and her faith is informed by the same philosophical underpinnings you see in her titles: Mercy. Hope. Repair. Grace.
Her books are instruction manuals for keeping our hearts soft — no small feat in a world determined to harden them. But a worthy endeavor if we’re invested in the work of caring for and connecting with one another. Which is the whole point, is it not?
“I hate to be a downer but now what?” Lamott writes in “Dusk, Night, Dawn.” “Where on earth do we start to get our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself back?”
After the arrival of COVID-19. After an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. After the historic racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. After climate crisis after climate crisis after climate crisis.
“We’d like to know how to rise up, how to help restore all that the locusts have stolen — the earth, the oceans, democracy,”
Lamott writes. “Even with our sore feet, hearing loss, stiff fingers, poor digestion, stunned minds, broken hearts. We are ill with shock and awe.”
But we’re determined not to be shocked into submission. Determined not to let inertia set in. And the pages that follow, like so much of Lamott’s writing, contain hope and healing and a healthy helping of her signature irreverence.
Onstage, I asked Lamott how she got this way. How or when she realized she had the ability to take her — and our — fears and frustrations and sorrows and joys and mistakes and absurdities and weave them into sentences that help people make sense of the world.
She said it started when her dad was dying of cancer. She looked for a book about losing the center of your universe to cancer, but she couldn’t find one because it wasn’t polite to talk about cancer back then. (Her dad passed away in 1979.)
That’s when it occurred to her that the most powerful words — the words with the capacity to heal us, to connect us, to nudge us toward progress — are simply the truth. That some diseases are terminal. That mothering is exhausting and, occasionally, joyless. That we (Lamott included) sometimes do brutal battle with substances. That humans fail and covet and contradict our better angels.
The truth isn’t always polite. But she writes it anyway. And people inhale it like oxygen.
She talked about gathering with friends to devour each new issue of Ms. magazine when it first launched because it told the truth, finally, about their lives and their bodies and the forces conspiring to harm or please or control or liberate them. That truth felt world-changing, she said.
I worry sometimes that we’re slipping back into a time when we bury uncomfortable truths. I see escalating book bans and legislation to keep educators from using genderaffirming language and efforts to downplay the full truth of our nation’s history, and I think we need to check our moral compass. If it’s set toward truth, we need to acknowledge and learn from a full range of human experiences and atrocities and accomplishments and heartbreaks and triumphs.
In 2017, I talked to Lamott by phone about “Hallelujah Anyway,” which was new at the time. She said this:
“I’d love for life to be more like a silverware drawer and put all the awful, terrifying things where the knives go and all the fabulous, beautiful, touching memories where the forks go, and where the spoons go would be all the curious things that make you wonder. But it’s not. Mercy and tragedy and devastation and resurrection and healing and woundedness all swirl together. But to focus on mercy means you see mercy more. It’s like you have a better pair of glasses on.”
The kind that help us see — and give voice to — the truth.