On with Kara Swisher - Radical Self-Acceptance, Cancel Culture, and Forgiveness with Writer Anne Lamott

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Author Anne Lamott has penned novels, but is most famous for her confessional memoirs about sobriety, raising her son as a single mother (Operating Instructions), being a liberal Christian and writing (Bird By Bird). Kara and Anne talk about her 20th book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love, why she thinks love is like Wi-Fi, how she dealt with nearly being canceled over a tweet, how to practice radical self-acceptance, and finding forgiveness — even for Donald Trump. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find Kara on Threads/Instagram @karaswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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but is most famous for her memoirs, which are confessional and hilarious and real. She has just published her 20th book, Somehow, Thoughts on Love. It is fantastic. I love it. Made me laugh, and it's pure Anne Lamott. And for fans, you'll know what that means. In her first best-selling memoir in the 1990s called Operate Instructions, which also happens

to be one of my favorite books, Lamott journaled about her first year as a single mom. But she's probably most famous for her 1994 memoir-slash-writing manual, Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life, also important to me. It became a classic and inspired many other writers, too. Thirty years later, it still pops up all over the place, Reddit pages, YouTube videos, memes. It was written into not one, but two episodes of the very popular Apple TV show, Ted Lasso. Since then, Anne's continued writing about her life, about navigating sobriety and motherhood, about her Christian faith and church in Marin County in California, about politics and her quote-unquote hardcore liberal lifestyle, about grace and forgiveness, about being less than perfect. The New York Times has called her the lefty guru of optimism.

All right, New York Times, calm down. There's so much to talk about with Anne Lamott, and I'm very much looking forward to it. Our question comes from researcher, storyteller, and the host of two podcasts, Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead, Brene Brown. We'll be back with all that and more after a quick break. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore.

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And it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. Hi, Anne, and welcome. Thanks for being here. I've been a huge fan of yours for years, as you know, and I'm excited to speak to you. Should I call you Anne or Annie? I noticed you say Annie.

You can call me Annie. Annie. You like that better? Well, with you, sure. All right. Oh, wow. I'm Anne with my dentist. Okay. So let me begin by saying congratulations on your 20th book. You've written seven novels, but you're most famous for your nonfiction memoirs like Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, Plan B, Hallelujah, Anyway. Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, Plan B, Hallelujah,

anyway. Operating Instructions was one of my favorite books and the first book I read of yours. I would love you to talk about the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction and which you enjoy most. Well, I really love nonfiction because it's sort of immediate gratification. I can write like one of the pieces and somehow might have taken three weeks to get right, right? And it's only eight manuscript, 10 manuscript pages. A novel is three years plus, and you have to keep so many plates spinning in the air. You don't know what you're doing until you've done a whole really terrible draft. And that might be a year and a half. And when you have a terrible draft, it's because all truth is paradox.

On the one hand, there's this incredible relief. It's a miracle from all that, you know, the unassaulted ice flow of blank pages. And then on the other hand, you look at it and your heart just sinks because it's not, you know, you started out writing this beautiful crystal and golden palace of fictional humankind and instead it's 200 pages too long and one character doesn't work at all um but so but it's thrilling to be a second draft into a novel there's no thrill like it where where you've come so close. You know that feeling when you're in months and months and months, and it's really close, and you kind of semi sort of know exactly

what to do. Then it's a little bit like Swiss watchmaking, because you're working it. But it takes a couple years to get to that point. Yeah, for me. With fiction, but nonfiction, not so. With nonfiction, I can write a really god awful first draft in a week and then the second week is usually the second draft and i know it's there that's the miracle i know it's there and it just needs a lot of help and i know how to help it first of all you know just to commit for the great writer who wrote the American way of death 50 years ago said, you have to kill your little darling,

which means you have to just take out the stuff you thought was so brilliant and aerial guy and charming and just spoke to your, the depth of your character. You have to take it out. Cause it sticks out. It's just show off the overkill. And then, um, so you take that, I take out the lies. I tried to do a draft where I take out the lies. And it's, you know, for me, and I don't know what it's like for you, but when I have an idea and a little work behind me, it's like pulling this rich black clay out of the river

and putting it on my work table. And it's really workable. You start to shape it. You take a ton of stuff off the table, right? You thought this went in the book, but it shape it. You take a ton of stuff off the table, right? You thought this went in the book, but it doesn't. You take a ton of stuff off. You start working it. And it, in my experience, this might sound too California, I believe the material knows what it is. I believe the characters know what they are. Like the marble. Like the marble knows what it is, right? And the marble knows what it is. and that I need to get quiet and receptive. And instead of trying to control the narrative and control the pace or the everything about it and just listen. And, you know, when all else fails, follow instructions and it will get back to me on this and that.

You know, I have a much more utilitarian. I just type. I just, I literally a much more utilitarian. I just type. I literally just type. I'm not as fussy. I am very efficient with my clay. I feel like I'm under time constraints because I do a lot of stuff. But you're so prolific. I mean, the amount of stuff that you produce is really quite astonishing.

Oh, thank you. I want to talk, starting about your new book of essays. It's called Somehow Thoughts on Love. You write in no particular order that love is a root system, a bench, a radio station, Wi-Fi, a piece of toast, and a diamond. It sounds a lot like 1 Corinthians, love is patient, love is kind, you know, that entire passage. In the Bible, love is connected to adjectives, you know, descriptions.

Yours are nouns. Talk about the difference and how it ties into this book. Well, you know, the very first words that God speaks to Moses, do you know what they are? He says, take off your shoes. You know, be here. Get your feet on the ground. The ground is sacred. He actually says that.

feet on the ground the ground is sacred he actually says that and and so that is an action of um taking off your shoes but the earth is a noun the ground beneath our feet is a noun the umbilical connection between our head and our heart and the earth the mother is that's a noun that's a connection love is a connection as you said i i said maybe it's like a wi-fi system where there's this love energy if we happen to take the time and slow down enough to notice that maybe love is somewhere to sit it's a bench one of the stories is about a bench in our neighborhood that someone made for us 50 years ago someone who made it for people who hadn't been born yet and um like the feminists and when i went in i'm 16 when the first issue of ms magazine comes out and the concept was we're doing work now for girls who haven't even been born and that's love and that's a magazine

and that was love that was like i read it with my best girlfriend, and it was like a Buddhist gong, right? So over and over again, if you see the action that you take, you can connect it to there having been a place, a person, a noun, where the connection, the connective port was, where you reach for me, and I received it, right? So you write, speaking of that, you write a lot about community, putting things to share on a bench, for example, even if it annoys people, but the idea of connections. I'm going to get to internet connections later, but you write a lot about connections and community in the real world. Yeah, yeah. Well, because I really found salvation in communities

and I'm an introvert and I like to be at home and you can ask my husband, it's very frustrating. I would never leave introvert and I like to be at home. And you can ask my husband, it's very frustrating. I would never leave the house if I didn't have to. And yet, you know, my favorite theologian, whose name is Frederick Buechner said 50 years ago, he said, you can accomplish a great deal alone. You can get a lot of your dreams to come true alone, blah, blah, blah, but you can't become human. You can't become human alone. You can't sing harmony alone. And so 31 years ago, I was still drinking and using.

And I ended up at this funky ramshackle broken down church that everybody's read about in every single book I've ever written. The people didn't try to get me to sign up for anything. They didn't try to get me to Bible study. They didn't try to get me to figure out who shot the Holy Ghost. They just saw that I was gravely terrified and injured. They got me water. And that was the first community that I really entered. I didn't even want it. But I just kept going back because sometimes grace looks like running out of any more good ideas. A year later, I got sober. And I write about this in a lot of books, but I write about it in Somehow. I knocked on that door and I entered.

And I didn't want to be there. And I didn't want to stop drinking. I like drinking. Right. Yeah, your church is so important to you. You didn't grow up religious. You are also what I would call a hardcore liberal. Liberal Christianity feels like an oxymoron these days. Do you feel like that? More and more. I mean, the visible Christians in

America are just mortifying. I mean, you want to run screaming for your cute little life. But Gandhi famously said that he loved Christ. It was just the Christians he had trouble with. And that's how I feel. But there's a lot of very, very progressive Christians out there doing the work for the common good. And I grew up, my parents were atheists and intellectuals. And I didn't mean to be a Christian. I mean, the last thing on earth I wanted to be, all my friends are left-wing liberals. And the liberals see this Christian thing mostly as my little blind spot. And of course, the Christians see my stances as being my little blind spot. But I just can't bog down in what they think I'm up to.

Well, do you think the religious right has co-opted Christianity in that way, as someone who's talked so publicly about religion and politics? Well, I think they tried. You cannot co-opt Christianity. You know, you can't get it to be what you want it to be. You can't get Christ to be what you decided you want him to be. I mean, the crucifixion looks like a huge win for the Romans, right? And it's not. And you can bury the truth like you buried Jesus in the ground, but you can't keep the

truth there. And so no matter what, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene or whoever, Matt Gaetz or the crazy megachurch pastors, no matter what they say, the truth is still the truth that we are loved beyond our comfort zone and that we cannot do anything to get us unloved. But I would say, not love is killing us, not love is killing the nation, and not love is killing democracy, it's killing the world. And so we just keep showing up. And it's a very simple message. You take care of the poor, you get thirsty people water, and you try to stop and breathe and get really quiet sometimes. So you can just feel the blessing of having been given this one

life. Well, one of the things is your book is, again, on the New York Times bestseller list. It debuted, I think, at number one. It's not surprising. Many of the themes of your writing are very much in the zeitgeist, sobriety, for example. As you said, you've been writing about being sober for decades. Now that it's something that actually people talk about, especially Gen Z, what do you think about the sober curious movement? I have noticed a lot of my friends talking in that style. Well, I was sober curious for about the last four years of my drinking. And that meant that I was on stages humiliating myself in blackouts. And I was waking up on, you know, with a different man than I'd gone to bed with. And that made me definitely a little bit curious about if there might be a

better way. But you know, when it's over, you know, and when it was over, it was over. You know what? I remember as a hippie, you know, 50 years ago, there was this great thing that was going around. it was called the four immutable laws of being human do you remember this one was whatever it starts is the right time who's there are the right people whatever happened is the only thing that could have happened and the fourth rule when it's over it's over and it when it's over for an alcoholic or a drug addict it's over it is stunningly over and addict, it's over. It is stunningly over. And that might be the point.

You know, I mean, at the end of my drinking, I was like smelly. But I was a successful writer. And I live in the same county I was born in. I was loved out of all sense of proportion. But the Swiss cheese holes in my soul, you know, they say the willingness comes from the pain. And I had created enough pain that I was willing to say, okay, fine. Do you have young people reach out to you for guidance? And what do you tell them?

All the time. Well, you mean alcoholic young people or just regular old? No, alcoholic young people or regular young people who are struggling. When younger people come to my readings or my lectures, I say to them, and especially really young people, I say, if you want to have a great life, become a reader. Like a calling to the monastery, be a reader. That is a guaranteed really good life.

I tell people that what the culture has told them about themselves is a complete crock and not to fall for it. You know, I learned a lot about young people. I've been a Sunday school teacher for 30 years and I lose kids. You know, I lost, I lose kids to alcohol, drugs. I lost a beautiful, precious girl to suicide because her family was Baptist and they said she couldn't love other girls. I've lost Sam's best friend growing up in this Sunday school to a bullet, a bullet underneath a homeless encampment. I mean, these are real lives. These are real kids. These are real. What is going to be like,

it's going to be hard. And I tell them that I don't give them nice Christian bumper stickers. I say it is going to be hard. And what has worked for me is that I have a couple of people that no matter what, I can tell the truth with. I tell them we're as sick as our secrets. I tell them they are loved beyond all imagining. I tell them that they will always have me, that no matter what happens, they can tell me and we will find a path to get on together with a little light to see by. I just tell them truth, you know? Self-compassion and radical acceptance, what you're talking about, are also very much being discussed today in this book. In others,

you write a lot about the struggle to love yourself, quite a bit. It's a theme throughout your books. At the end of the book, you loosely quote William Blake and say, we're here to learn to endure the beams of love. Talk about why this has been your mantra, I think, for 50 years and why that is hard. I paraphrase, but we are here to learn to endure the beams of love. And I've always written that love is forgiveness school. And it turned out after about 10 years of sobriety that I couldn't forgive me for the time I'd wasted for what I believed. And I don't know if you're allowed to say shit on your show, but all the shit I'd eaten because the culture told me to.

I grew up in the 50s and the early 60s, and I was told that my value was determined by how men, if they thought I was bright and funny and charming, but also that I didn't give off too much light because it would make them feel bad about their lives. And so I never was told that I could be a person that was loved and cherished, deserving of oxygen, be as juicy as I was born to be if it interfered with men's self-esteem. No one mentioned that, that I could just be loved because of who I am, just period. love because of who I am just period and um and so I was good at taking care of the whole world as a girl of the 50s I was like a flight attendant to my very damaged family I was like a flight attendant to the world that's how I learned to be accepted and respected and um to all of a sudden stop that train and to just see what was true to see if i was actually

it was capable that osmosis could be some kind of energetic exchange where love came into me and i took it i didn't have to save or fix or rescue anyone to feel the beams of love that i would say divine love or the wi-fi love, the energetic love, that I could just practice it. It would be like Nautilus for the soul. But we are here to learn to endure the beams of love. It's just a beautiful mantra because it gives us direction. I'm just going to take it. I'm not going to try to convince you that I'm not worthy, that if you got to write

our secret... If you only knew me, right. So let's get into that, because the theme of radical self-love comes up in the title essay of the book, obviously, the chapter, Somehow, it's about making mistakes, asking for forgiveness, about finding grace. You write, some of us grew up in families where mistakes felt like matters of life and death, where you might get a belt or sent to your room without eating, as in my family, which bred the sickness of perfectionism and lifelong fear of making mistakes, especially in public. But committing a public disgrace is exactly what I did this one time. It was truly reprehensible. This is about the time you misgendered Caitlyn Jenner in 2015. Talk about the backstory and why you wanted to write about it again. And I'll note,

this all happened on Twitter. In your essay, you talk about how you wanted to write about it again. And I'll note, this all happened on Twitter. In your essay, you talk about how you refused to say that you'd evolved, that radical self-love meant saying, I'm not who I am when I screw up. We've seen actors, politicians, celebrities get canceled, or they think they are for all sorts of reasons. I'd like you first to talk about why you wrote about this, and then I'd like you to answer the question, do you you think cancel culture has gone too far or has the anti-anti-woke movement overstated it which is kind of my feeling i don't know if i can answer that last part so i'll go back to the other part which i can't talk about uh so in uh 2000 after caitlyn jen transitioned, I was at the Grand Canyon with one of my oldest friends, and she had tweeted this horrible, horrible thing about Caitlyn Jenner. And I don't know why, but because we were just laughing and joking.

And I know I always had a position against her because she was a Republican. because she was a Republican. She was somebody that was going to vote against the rights of transgendered people, of the LGBTQ community, because of her conservative viewpoint. And so I was sort of predisposed not to like her. And then I retweeted this extremely stupid and offensive thing. Well, it just went viral. But the main thing that mattered to me was that it hurt my son so deeply because one of his best friends is um a trans male and he it was just horrible i don't know if you've ever

hurt your children at that level and i hadn't but i did and so i you know of course i retweeted it and i apologized publicly i went very public but it had a life of its own. And so then I started dancing as fast as I could to make it up. And you can't really. It just happened. And so then I wrote a piece about the process of my son and I finding our way back to love with each other. And I wrote it. It was three books ago. It was called Hallelujah Anyway.

It was a book on mercy. And it was about Sam finding mercy. And it was about me finding mercy for me. And I came clean, and I was specific, and I wrote about it. And I kind of thought, nice old me, that that had taken care of it, but it didn't. And then a couple years ago, it came up again. And I've had two lectures, like really important lectures, canceled because a couple students went to the dean and said she's transphobic. And so that was that. And I thought, well, instant karma.

And that happens. And I can live with that. had to do with a fundraiser I was doing for a law firm that represents trans refugees, like the most vulnerable, marginalized people. And I wanted to do a fundraiser for them. And one of the board members came to the person who was in charge, who was the lawyer in charge, and said, well, Anne Lamott is transphobic, and I don't think we can have her representing us. And so that's what I write about in the book.

How do you live with somebody saying, Anne Lamont is transphobic? That was my 17th book, and I had a track record again of being anything but. Well, do you understand people, including the trans community, say apologizing isn't enough? From your perspective as a person of faith, would you always call to forgive?

Because I think it's a question I had a recent incident in my family where my son said to someone in our family who had said something terrible to him. He said, I know you think you love me, and I still love you, which was interesting. It was an interesting way to put it. I know you think you do. And it was really fantastic. It was an interesting way to put it. I know you think you do. And it was really fantastic. I was like, my son is so fantastic. So can you talk about that, the idea of that forgiveness? And are there people you wouldn't forgive? And how do you deal with that? I think it's, you know, it's worthy of a book, forgiveness. It's hard. It's the hardest work we do when we've been injured. And I have been sober almost 38 years and in therapy for 25 of them.

And so I have done the deep dive into the resentments and the people I haven't forgiven. And it's the hardest work I do. You know, forgiveness doesn't mean you want to have lunch with the person or actually even see them again. It's kind of a cliche that forgiveness is letting the prisoner out of jail and turning out the prisoner was you, you know, and that we forgive for our own healing and our own restoration. It's funny because it's the ground of Christianity is forgiveness. And yet, and I'll say, you know, it's hard for me. It doesn't come to me. It's like I'm reformed.

But I have thought, partly getting old, is that one of the blessings is that you start throwing stuff out of the psychic airplane that's kept you flying too low. But are there any people that you wouldn't forgive? Like, let's start with Trump, sleeping in court. He's very anti-woke these days. But someone like that, someone like that. Okay, so I wrote in another book, I was in such a state of hatred. Yeah, you likened him, let me read this, you likened him to a dog on the street with mange. You said, from a recovery perspective, yeah, it was a quote,

a giant bottom for the nation. Everyone I know who is clean and sober, it all began with catastrophic bottoms. You woke up and you knew you were just completely doomed. I think the nation has hit a tragic bottom. That's what you wrote. Well, I can just talk. Yeah, I think we have.

Well, this was 2018. We might be at a bottom or bottom, but go ahead. No, I think we're going to be okay. But anyway, we'll get to that. But I got so toxic and frantic and spiky with my hatred and terror of Donald Trump. I guess it was 2018. And then I went to church and my pastor quoted that great line of Martin Luther King saying, don't let them get you to hate them.

Because when you let them get you to hate them, you've lost your center. You've lost everything inside of you that is beautiful and is love-based and has a sweetness in her soul about life. And I went, oh my God, they've gotten me to hate them. And I started to see where the people we hate tend to be funhouse mirrors for us. Like we hate something about ourself that we see in them. So I saw the arrogance. I saw the narcissism. I saw this, the rage. I saw that need to be right. And I started to have, I mean, I'm going to spend the next six months fighting daily tooth and nail to cut the head off that snake. And I started to have, I mean, I'm going to spend the next six months fighting daily tooth and nail to cut the head off that snake. And I mean that in a warm and Christian way.

But by the same token, I think maybe God has a sort of a waiting room and said, you are welcome. You are my child. I love you. We've got a tiny bit of cleaning up to do though. We'll be back in a minute. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees. And it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you. Tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos,

and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere, and you're making content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. You wrote, a girl has to wonder if it's worth it at this late age with this thin

skin to be in the public eye. And then the New York Times published, which you tweeted was the single worst review of your life. You said you felt doomed. Talk to me about, you wrote me also, why did the, because I said this is fucking ridiculous. Why did the review hit you so hard? And what was your recipe for moving on? I got a very strange review in the New York Times too, but I don't give a fuck. No, you didn't.

Okay, well, first of all- But I don't give a fuck. I'm like a bestseller. I know you don't. I want to be more like you when I grow up. And I think I am already. Having even just talked to you a few weeks ago helped me. But first of all, it was just mortifying. I mean, it's the first review I ever got that mentioned my hair and referred to my work as embroidered

throw pillows. So that was a little, I thought, below the belt. But I was 3,000 miles from my husband and son and grandchild and the dog. And it was just so humiliating, the language in which she wrote about me. And I didn't have anyone to turn to. It was too early to call everybody. It was like four in the morning in California. I was on East Coast time. It was just humiliating. It didn't say, well, I don't really like this sort of book. And so, you know, it's not with a grain of salt or whatever. I don't really do soul and spirit stuff. I'm more into it. So take that.

It just said, you know, this is just California woo-woo embroidered throw pillows. And the whole, the entire community of writers that I have respected and tried to be there for and who have been there for me saw it. And it just, you know, it couldn't help but hurt a lot. But it didn't hurt for all that long. That was a miracle. Yeah. And by the way, throat pillars are fantastic. I know, right?

We all love a throat pillow. Did you get some in the mail? I was thinking of sending you one. Oh, you're sweet. I love a throat pillow. Who doesn't love throat pillows, by the way? Here's the thing about getting older is that this stuff, it felt very personal, like a personal attack. It was a personal attack.

This stuff is always going to hurt. There's no way it's not going to hurt you or get, you know, not you, but anybody but you. It's going to get under their skin. But the blessing of being older is that you shake it off a lot faster. And that before it might've been a really bad week. And I wrote a piece in the Washington Post about that. You know, by my age, you have like this battered old toolbox and you reach into it and you know, to pick up the 200 pound phone, you know, that you need to overeat, right? You need balance. You need some perspective. You need to getat right you need balance you need um some perspective you need to

get outside you need the big picture you need several women have been attacked by the new york times and reviews it's really and you know including beyonce and taylor swift like it's really interesting it's fascinating right in that same week beyonce and Taylor Swift. And then two days later, Carolyn Leavitt. And then the day after that, Jane Smiley. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres. And in a way that was degrading. But anyway, the story is that out of that comes a story I completely love that is published in the Washington Post. I'm going to tell you a line I also live by, which is Rumi, my Persian mystic who I live by. And he said, through love, all pain will turn to medicine.

So I get this review by somebody that I kind of hoped my whole life to get a good review by. And I did the work. I did the spiritual work. I did the psychological work. I did the psychological work. I did everything I knew to do. And through the love of my husband, my son, my son, through you, who I've never met, through people I've never met, it turned into medicine. And I wrote a piece that people are going to be healed by. Your son tweeted a very sweet note on Twitter, which was great. He called you an uncool California hippie Sunday school teacher, single mothers, who

gets to be number one. Anyway, Sam is in a lot of your work. This is your son going all the way back to your first bestseller. And my favorite book of yours, Operating Instructions, a journal of my son's first year. You wrote it in 1989 and published in 1993. I read it that year, and it was a book that reinforced my decision as far back as when I was a teenager that this lesbian was going to have a lot of kids, and I have had four. So it was a really important book. You were journaling about the first year as a mother, the fear you held for your baby boy,

the moments of love you had for him, but the fear you held for your baby boy, the moments of love you had for him, but the moments you loathed him. You wrote about many things that parents think but were not allowed to say out loud, really, or didn't say out loud or weren't supposed to. When you read that now, what do you think? How do you look at that book when you look back at it? I don't reread my own work. I just don't. And I've never, I never listened to my own audios and whatnot. But you know, the thing about operating instruction, so same thing with bird by bird was that I just said what everyone thinks. I said universal truths about being a mom, being a parent, being a writer, that you're not supposed to say, i.e. that it can be an infant

with colic can bring outrage in you that you didn't know you had, and this feeling of mental meltdown. And there's a line I know in operating instructions that said, I was thinking about wrapping them up really, really carefully and leaving them outside just for one night so I could get some sleep. And there's not a parent anywhere that hasn't felt that. And I remember when I had had a really horrible, horrible night with the colic, some sleep and there's not a parent anywhere that hasn't felt that like just for and i remember when i had had a really horrible horrible night with the colic and i was a single mother and had no money i didn't have a lot of resources except love my friends my brothers and my mom and um i remember him lying down and then thinking oh god he's raising his loathsome reptilian head.

And there was no baby books that had ever said that before. And there was an appearance who didn't get it. I get it. Right then, right? Yeah, you got it. But same with writing. Every single writing book that existed until then said, well, if you sit down and you just, you know, follow an outline and you just do that, it should go pretty well that day and

here. And then, you know, if you do this, then here's how to find an agent, you know, and it was just another crock. And so I decided to write a writing book that would say the same thing the baby book said, it's going to be really, really hard. Don't give up. This is what I found helped me. Maybe it will help you. Yeah, yeah. No, I remember thinking at one point, do you think whiskey a little bit would be a problem? Like many times, four times so far, and it's still there. And I haven't done it yet. But one of the things in operating instructions that you do is you express worry and fear about your newborn son becoming an addict someday. That did happen later on. And then he got sober. There is a very short but very,

it was so immediate scene where you have a pencil, you have one line about it, having a pencil outside of your house, with sharp pencil saying, don't come in, you had your grandson, Jax, in somehow, you mentioned it. But talk a little bit about that, because you co-authored a book with Sam, and you had been worried as a parent. Well, yeah. Well, Sam got on the same path I got on at about 14 or 15. He ends up being a mess head and an alcoholic. He had a baby at 19, and we all did the best we could. And it was incredibly hard. And pretty soon, my grandson, his name is Jax, J-A-X-X when he was a baby he and his mother moved in with me they'd been living with Sam in the city and Sam was just showing up wasted you know and

I left him in jail one night because I felt like if I fished him out again and made it not be that horrible a consequence I don't know that he'd be alive now if I hadn't and I got to the point where I thought it was insane to keep letting a drunk, addicted person onto the property when there was a baby, you know? And so I ended up telling him, you can't be here if you've been drinking. And of course he was livid and he went out into the street and I followed him and I've been writing and I had a sharpened pencil in my hand and I held it up near his throat. And I said, do you have any idea what this is doing to your precious child? And then he said the F word to me.

And then we had a miracle. I mean, this is why I think Grace Batts laughed. I offered him a ride back to the city in the same minutes that I told him he couldn't be on the property anymore. And we drove to the city in absolute silence. I think I had Jack Kornfield on the tape. And we got out of the car. He was living in a tenderloin. I got out and I hugged him.

And he hugged me. We did not say a word. But now it was over. And about 10 days later, he called. And he said, the community in the city fished me out. And I've got a week. Can I come back? I said, are you kidding?

Let me come get you, you know. And the grace of God and the sober man, he's coming up on 14 years, you know, one day at a time and all that. Let me say every week we get a question from an outside expert. This week's question goes back to this topic, what you're talking about, your son. It's a bit long, but it's a good one. Listen. Okay. Hi, Anne. Hi, Kara. It's Brene Brown. And Anne, I finished Somehow, Thoughts on Love, and wow, somehow it was exactly what I needed to read right now. Let me first thank you, Anne, for riding shotgun with me over the past 28 years. I'm celebrating 28 years of sobriety this month, and so you've been a big part of it. So thank you.

Here's my question. The William Blake quote that you love, that I think of you and William Blake now when I hear it, we are here to learn to endure the beams of love. The big question I have is, when someone you love is seemingly on a path of self-destruction, and it can be like a parent that you're taking care of. It can be a partner. It can be a friend who's married to a total asshole, and you just see the hurt over and over. It can be a partner. It can be a friend who's married to a total asshole and you just see the hurt over and over. It could be a grown child, anybody. What is the obligation or invitation from love when someone that you care for deeply is self-destructing. I know the boundaries.

I know the Al-Anon work. But I also don't know how to endure the beams of love while I'm watching someone hurting and making choices that are really hard to watch. So that's my big question. Anne, you write about this, as you said. Oh, I love it. Love it, love it, and love her. I mean, that's another whole long essay. But what I did and what I've done over the years is that there is this 12-step program for people with tiny, tiny control issues like myself who want to try and fix and save and the people that they love most who are seemingly about may die of their choices and their

addictions. What I did was I just stopped the train. I just, you know, help doesn't work. My help to them is not helpful. Help is just any side of control. I had to go look in the mirror, and I was the problem because I was so eating it and trying to fix them and manage their lives and manipulate them. And I was monitoring them, you know, like it was NASA, and I was counting their drinks or doing drug tests or whatever. And I had to look in the mirror and realize I was the problem and that I had to do my own healing. And I had to get back on my own emotional acre. And it has a fence on it.

And I don't let really crazy sick people come onto my acre anymore. And I don't barge onto theirs. The last thing somebody who's suffering like that needs is for me to barge onto their acre with my carry-on luggage of projection and anxiety and terror that they'll die. I had to come to the realization that my son might die. And I had to stop trying to goad him into doing what I thought would make sense. And what you do is you get help for your condition. I always felt with my son that my control, my trying to save him, my giving him money, my doing everything I tried,

it was like I had this rusty fish hook embedded in my chest, and the other end of it was embedded into his chest. And I had this illusion from having done this as a child that it was keeping him afloat that this fishing line embedded in our in the hooks and when I finally had the courage to do and courage is fear that has said its prayers and I was very afraid maybe more afraid than anything I've ever done before I metaphorically unhooked that rusty hook from my chest and it hurt like hell and I released him and because of the grace of God and a bunch of sober men I think that's a smart thing I just

had an experience like that where I we were dealing with someone who wouldn't listen to us and finally I said well if you fall you fall and of course they fell they do fall that's what it is that's the way it goes um i want to finish up talking about writing in your process digital blogs and twitter have become a new journal um how do you think some of your books would have gone if you'd written it as a blog um if you tweeted things like wanting to leave your son out on the lawn overnight you actually couldn't probably tweet that so you could get some sleep you are active on x formerly called Twitter and social media. I'm curious how it would have changed your life if this that had existed in those times and how it's changed your writing now.

Well, I'm not sure that I don't have a blog. I don't think I have a website. My son says, kind of nicest mom, don't let people see you try to do things because she thinks that it will just tear down the family but so I don't think I could be who I was if I had started in the modern world because I think when I make a mistake when I say something off the top of my head it goes viral like when I tweeted what I thought was a pretty innocuous thing about Taylor Swift. And at the end of New Year's day that I hoped in 2024, we could read ever so slightly less about Taylor Swift.

At that point, I knew that her boyfriend's cousin had gotten Taylor Swift's mother for Christmas. I said, maybe there could be a tiny, tiny bit less. No, no,

no, no, no, no. It went viral. I got more coverage for that line. All ugly. A hundred thousand attacks. Oh, you hate women. Oh, you're jealous of her because you're an old white lady with dreadlocks. She's such a better, you know? And I got into vanity care. I was in every single major newspaper. So I-

I could have told you that, Anne, a lot. I think that maybe it's best that I wrote this stuff before the internet. Yeah, right. But are people publishing first drafts doing that? Do you think it hurts writing? I don't know about that. My son has a writing collective called aritingroom.com. And on it, people publish their first drafts there and they help one another.

And they say things like, I don't think this is ready, but I think I love your voice. I love the theme and do it again. And so in a collect, any kind of community doesn't have to be a writing room. It could be at your community college. It could be at a bookstore that you post something on the cork board.

You need people to say, I love a lot about this. This is not publishable. Don't try to get an agent yet. Let's do it again. I'm going to be with you side by side and let's make it better. So I don't read blogs. I don't even know how to get, I don't, you know what? I don't know what to say, except that you need a community. You need a village of people saying this is ready to go. So last two questions. You've always also been a very political writer. We talked about Trump, but where do you think we are right now? You just said hopeful, which I was surprised by.

Looking ahead towards November, you seem to have more hope. You said, I think we're okay. Why is that? I do think we're okay. Yeah. Well, first of all, I love what John Lennon said that everything works out in the end. And if it hasn't worked out, it's not the end. And Orson Welles said, it's a happy or sad movie, depending on where you end it. And so I'm just feeling the plates of the earth shift underneath us right now. And I'm not positive that being in a criminal courtroom every single day for weeks and weeks is a good long-term strategy. And I think that it was really successful for the first few days because Trump could fundraise off of it. But I think that the word is out that this really is about democracy, that this really is about women's rights.

democracy, that this really is about women's rights. Florida passed the six-week ban, right? I mean, thousands and thousands of girls and women are going to die to fight for the rights of a five-celled zygote instead of the rights of born girls and born women. And I just think that things apply. I feel it. I start with that great Arundhati Roy line that says, another world is not only possible, but it's on our way on a quiet day. I can hear her coming. I can hear her coming. And I feel that the young and I feel that women and I feel the older are just rising up and that we can feel the opposite of that coming. Not love is killing us. And I feel this movement towards getting serious about the election. I'd much, much rather be us. I love our team.

I love Kamala. I'm from San Francisco. And I love our team. I'd much, much rather be us at this point than them. So final question. In many of your essays, you come back to the idea of operating instructions or general instructions for life. You also call them a launch code or a gratitude list. You have a bunch and they change. What are they for you today? Before we go, give us three of your latest instructions to live by. I love that question. Well, I always tell my son that when all else fails, follow instructions. You know, he's got the instructions. And I tell my grandson that, I mean, I gave him rules his whole life.

The main rule was that Nana must never be hurt or squirted. But the other rule was that you're here to love and be loved and just do it today. That's all you have to do is love and be loved. If you want to have loving feelings, do loving things. Call your most annoying aunt who goes into full tilt weird and stay on the phone with her. And the third thing is look up. My pastor said 30 years ago that you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lids because they walk around bumping into the glass bitterly and all they have to do is look up. So my whole family, we go outside and we look up. You don't go outside and go, well, that's a median moon. Or yeah, I like stars. I do like stars. You look,

go outside and you go, wow. You go, holy cow. And that hits the reset button. I think we'll end on those words. Look up. All right. Anne Lamott, you're a national treasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. God, I love, love being with you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, Jolie Myers, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher and Andrea Lopez Cruzado.

Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, look up. If not, look up. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back on Monday with more. We'll be back on Monday with more. Support for this podcast comes from Anthropic.

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