Anne Lamott on love, sobriety and reaching 70: ‘All I’ve learned, I’ve learned because the abyss swallowed me’

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When I speak with Anne Lamott, she is in a “hotel-motel” in Ypsilanti, Michigan, halfway through a cross-country book tour, flaunting sparkly pink nails. The manicure was part of a coping strategy initiated in response to a bad review – “seriously the worst review” of her life, said Lamott. No matter that Somehow: Thoughts on Love, her 20th book, is cresting the New York Times’ bestseller list – a dig by a prominent critic can still capsize her day.

But this is Anne Lamott, known for her preternatural ability to uncover grace in all her trials, from the trivial to the existentially unmooring. Lamott has found Christ-like qualities in a colicky baby, self-love in the abyss of addiction, and even ways to shepherd her own neuroses when they arrive at the writing desk like damaged relatives “with their weird coppery breath”.

In this latest book, which reads as a collection of parables, themes of love and grace are often interchangeable. Lamott recalls, for instance, a friend who found a small frog in the shower, which she picked up and carried to its rightful place in the grass outside. The frog, panicking en route to safety, was insensible to the murmured comforts of its carrier. “I think this is one of the best examples of how love operates when we are most afraid and doomed,” writes Lamott, “carrying us to a safer place while we pound against cupped hands.”

The idea that we can entrust ourselves to such tender devotion – no matter how ill-fated our lives might seem – is a central thesis of Somehow. Through anecdotes about marriage, illness, best intentions, and penance for a misfired transphobic tweet in 2015, Lamott presents love variously as a vessel, a shelter, a meditation – and “our only hope”.

And now, in the face of a bad review, Lamott is trying to exercise the wisdom she extols. She’s leaning on her loved ones back home in Marin county, and drawing strength from the outpouring on social media, where fans remind her to shake it off. “And then they said really horrible things about the reviewer and the review. And that, of course, was the best thing of all.”

I spoke with Lamott over Zoom. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book launched last month and the next day you celebrated your 70th birthday. Does that number carry any particular significance for you?

Anne Lamott: It certainly sounds old. When I was younger, I really loved drugs and alcohol, and I didn’t think I’d see 18. And then I didn’t think I’d see 21. Then I didn’t think I’d see 30.

Then I got sober when I was 32 – almost 38 years ago – and I thought, oh, I’ve reached the mountaintop. Then I had a kid and felt this urgency to try to stay alive, which I hadn’t felt for a long time. Then I saw 50.

But I loved my 60s. I felt at the height of my mental and spiritual and psychological wellness. As you get older, you just start throwing this stupid stuff off your airplane that kept you flying so low for so long. You just think, I don’t have the time. I don’t care any more. I don’t care what my butt looks like.

By my age, you’ve seen so many people die, many of them younger. And so you get serious about understanding we’re all on borrowed time, and that you’ve got to make a decision about how you’re going to live this one short, precious life.

How does that realization change the stakes when it comes to love?

Over the years, I have picked some really terrible but charming and well-known men. Sometimes attractive and sometimes not. Sometimes they were just good company and the world loved them. But I always secretly knew that if they were a woman, they wouldn’t be my best girlfriend. They wouldn’t even be a close girlfriend.

And then when I was 62 I met this guy, Neal Allen. And just after one coffee with him, I realized that if he were a woman, he would be my best girlfriend. That’s the value I held out for and that’s what I encourage people who still long to find a soulmate to hold out for: it should be a person who you want to talk to for the rest of your life. A person whose commitment is to kindness and who has read every single book you’ve ever read and loved and vice versa.

In December, you wrote in the Washington Post about the slow descent of “the creaking elevators of age”. Apart from death, what awaits you at the end of your ride?

I imagine I will be surrounded by my husband and son and two friends. And they will have called hospice because we all do now. And the hospice is the calvary. They will come in with their syringes full of morphine, so I know I won’t have any pain and I won’t have any fear.

I’m a Sunday school teacher. I teach my kids that death is a pretty significant change of address. And I do believe that the soul is immortal. I don’t know what that will translate into. [The spiritual teacher] Ram Dass said it’s like taking off a pair of really tight shoes. I think I agree with that.

There is so much money and attention being spent on longevity these days, which, I think, entails a certain denial of death. I was chatting a while back with people who work in end-of-life care, and their view was that our fear of death detracts from our ability to live a good life.

There’s an American way of forward thrust: you must always be moving and you must be moving higher in terms of recognition or acclaim or stature. I developed that toxic self-consciousness. It kept me from being here, breathing it all in and observing with a small degree of amusement and wonder and tenderness, because I was so fixated on what I looked like and how I was coming across and how I was doing.

The forward thrust has to do with the fear of death, because if you keep moving very quickly, then you’re going to outrun the abyss. The abyss isn’t going to open at your feet and swallow you up. But everything I’ve learned that’s of any importance, I’ve learned because the abyss opened up and swallowed me. Christians call it the dark night of the soul; an alcoholic will call it a bottom. And when you hit that bottom and you have to be in it for a little while, boy, you find out who you really are.

Your parents were atheists. How did you come to Christianity?

Well, it was really an accident, believe me. I’d always studied God and different religious traditions and believed that there was something that heard me if I said hello quietly in the middle of the night. But I avoided Christianity like the plague. I feel about Christians the way everybody feels about Christians. I love what Gandhi said, that he loved Christ, but it was Christians he had a problem with, and that’s totally how I feel about it.

And then at the end of my drinking, there was this flea market near this tiny house where I was living. And I’d go over there because when you’re really hungover you want greasy food and strong coffee. And I could hear music wafting out of this ramshackle, cruddy looking church with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree outside of it. It was the music of the Weavers and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger that my parents had been very fond of. So I just started going over there because I loved the music.

For me, one definition of grace is just running out of any more good ideas. So I get my greasy food and my strong coffee. I was bulimic at the time. I was hungover every single day, and I just went and sat down, and they didn’t hassle me. They didn’t try to get me to join them or to figure out anything or to take Bibles. They just got me water. They could see I was a really sad, damaged person.

I always left before the sermon because it was just too ridiculous for words. And then one day I didn’t, and I experienced saying to Jesus, kind of bitterly: “OK, fine, you can come in.” And I just tried that out, and it was really sweet.

What role did that new faith play in your sobriety?

I converted a year before I got sober. So I had a kind of gap year at church, where I was very smelly and weird and arrogant all at the same time. I had terrible self-esteem because of the way I was living and then I was very arrogant because I’ve been raised to think that the Lamotts were better and more educated.

I stayed there for a year and then I got sober. Church did not get me sober, but my deterioration did and I finally had no place to go. I would have died, I think. And so I just gave recovery a shot.

You mentioned that you married your now husband Neal in your 60s. You’ve had your share of loves and opportunities – what made you ready for Neal to enter your life?

I was raised in the 1950s and early 1960s to understand that women take care of everybody else and that your value comes from being a flight attendant to everybody in the world. I also have a really warm and open heart and I like to take care of people, but my life force was entirely spent on my son and his little baby and the baby’s mother and everybody around me. I was depleted.

And one day, my older brother, who’s a fundamentalist Christian, was staying with me and I said, “I’m just so isolated. I just am so empty right now. I’m all used up.” And he said some sort of happy Christian horseshit. I adore him, but it was like a bumper sticker and I was just furious.

I got in the car and started driving and crying and pounding the steering wheel and telling my son and grandson and the baby mama and my parents and my brothers how much I hated and resented that they sucked me dry and how sad I was.

Later, I came back to town and I called my mentor of 38 years, Horrible Bonnie (she’s horrible because I can’t get her to not love me). And I said, “I’m nobody’s priority.” And she said, “Oh, Annie, this is what we paid for.” She said, “You’re not anybody’s priority because you’re not your own. You’re going to need to take a few months off to have to have a love affair with yourself. You’re going to start with getting the overpriced tamales at the health food store and some flowers. And you’re going to have to do that every day.”

And I was like, no, no, it’s too California. I’m not going to do that. But when all else fails, follow instructions. So I did it. And about three months later, I met Neal. There’s a site called OurTime that’s an offshoot of Match for older people. I met him and we had coffee and we’ve never been apart.

You’ve talked about your own experience with addiction, and you’ve been sober now for almost 38 years. But you also watched your son go through his own battles with addiction. What happened during that time?

Oh, God, it was so awful. He’s got almost 14 years clean and sober now, by the grace of God, but at about age 14, he started to get drunk and stoned a lot of the time. He got into meth and anything he could get his hands on and it was just terrifying.

And I did what you do if you’re a mother. I tried everything. I sent him off to the highest peak of the Allegheny mountains for three months, and then to an organic tofu farm. And when he came home he was dealing the next day. He got his girlfriend pregnant at 19, and they had the baby, and he just got worse and worse.

Nothing I tried worked. Eventually, I left him in jail. The bail bondsman said, “Oh, my God, Ms Lamott, you’re the first mother in my 20 year history as a bail bondsman who left her child in jail.” And, you know, I’m not positive he’d still be alive if I hadn’t.

And then I said, “You can’t come over. You can’t be on the property wasted.” And he stomped off. I didn’t know when we’d ever talk again. But then about 10 days later, he called to say that he had a week clean and sober.

I imagine so many families in similar positions of watching their loved ones suffer would not be able to make those 10 days. They would capitulate to wanting to help. If you were to offer advice to those of us who are watching loved ones suffer, what would you say?

I would say that help is the sunny side of control.

There are these little acronyms in the recovery movement, and one of them is the five M’s: We try to manage others. We martyr ourselves, we manipulate them, and we mother them and the entire world. And the fifth one is so awful: we monitor them, like I’m an android or something, where I can monitor people’s behavior and the number of drinks they’re having or whether I can smell pot on them.

I just learned to release him. Horrible Bonnie taught me this tool, which was to close my eyes and picture the person there and to push them away into the arms of their own destiny.

I had to make peace with the fact that maybe I would lose [my son]. It wasn’t anything but a nightmare. Either he would die driving drunk, or he’d commit suicide or he’d overdose. And I just had to release him.

Somehow is your 20th book. At this point, is there anything that you feel you still urgently need to say?

Not really. I wrote every single thing I know about writing, motherhood, grandmotherhood, mercy, faith, hope.

My dream is not to publish any more. I hate publishing. I hate book tours. I’m exhausted. I’m a homebody. I like to be on the couch with the dog and the New Yorker or People magazine – either one will do.

• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org