Fomenting the Revolution – Anne Lamott

Photo by Mark Richards

Last night, on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, I heard Anne Lamott speak at Book Passage, one of my favorite bookstores.
Anne (often referred to as Annie) was at the tail end of a three-week tour for the paperback release of her book, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith. She was in particularly fiery form, unleashing her hilarious fury at everyone from Dick Cheney to John McCain to the media pundit who criticized Hilary Clinton for fat ankles.
A hometown favorite, Annie grew up in nearby Tiburon, spent a lot of time in Bolinas, and now lives in Fairfax. With her dreadlocks tied back in a batik scarf and wearing red clogs and a lilac-colored jumper, she spoke to a large, standing-room only crowd, including many longtime family friends.

She also received a heartfelt welcome from Book Passage’s founder and president, Elaine Petrocelli, who revealed that she’d given every one of her own daughters and daughters-in-law the book Operating Instructions, which so humorously and wisely gave new mothers permission to not be perfect.
I’ve re-read Annie’s book on writing, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, several times and have given it more than once as a gift. Like Operating Instructions, it is a book about struggling with shitty first drafts, perfectionism, jealousy, false starts, and – my personal favorite – that powerful radio station KFKD (read the book to find out…).
Annie writes about subjects that many of us are too fearful to approach, such as her family. On Tuesday night, the evening before I went to see her, someone in the audience asked her if she ever thought her son Sam, who is now in college, would sue her, presumably for what she’d written about him over the years.
Annie explained that she’d asked Sam for his permission to write about him since he was ten, including if it would be okay for her to write about the time she slapped him when he was sixteen. “Are you okay with this,” she asked him, after he read her draft. “No,” he replied “You’ve made me look even crazier than you!”
She rewrote the story and by the time it was published in Salon, she told the audience that Sam really liked it. But the emails she got from angry readers were “an avalanche of toxicity,” she recalled.
Sam saw her sitting in front of her screen, red-eyed and upset. He told her to “get out of that chair!” He began scrolling down the page after page of emails, becoming enraged. “What is your editor’s email address?” he demanded.
She gave it to him and he fired off an email that said something like, “You Are Suppose to be there to Protect your Writers. F*** You! My Mother Quits!” Annie didn’t stay away from Salon long, after, in her typically self-deprecating humor, she “sleazed [her] way back into their good graces.”
Annie’s talk was being recorded by KPFA so when it’s broadcast you can hear her tell the story herself. But it’s a perfect example of the advice she often gives to beginning writers: write the stories you’d love to read, particularly the tough, painful, and embarrassing ones.
In Bird by Bird she wrote:

“I would have felt so relieved if there had been a book written by another mother who admitted that she sometimes wanted to grab her infant by the ankles and swing him over her head like a bolo. So I went ahead and started writing one myself, as a present, as a kind of road map for other mothers.”