This blog entry will not be terribly coherent, but I wanted to sit down on this snowy morning and write about Anne Lamott. She’s an author from California, and on a grander scale she simply speaks the truth and makes us all feel a bit better about our existence– and she does it with just the right balance of humor and profanity. I am transcribing from the small notebook I keep in my purse, so I hope that what I write does not result in any mischaracterizations.

So I went to see her last weekend- before the snow came, before I came home to New England for the Thanksgiving weekend, before I ate a box of peppermint Junior Mints while watching football last night. She visited the Philadelphia Free Library while on a tour for her new book, Small Victories. She is best known (in my world) for the fantastic read, Bird By Bird—  and that might be the one I direct you to if you this blog entry makes you curious.

Anne rolled onto stage wearing a pair of baggy jeans and a striped top with black cardigan. It’s hard to explain exactly why, but her outfit gave the audience (or at least me) the impression that impressing us was nowhere on her radar;  it was more like she had just walked out her front door and was ready to sit on her stoop and chat with the neighbors. As she took the stage, she announced that she had been battling a cold, and in the podium cubby she had Kit Kats at the ready “for medicinal purposes.”  And in case we didn’t believe her, she reached in and waved the bag around for everyone to see. From the very outset, her honesty had our undivided attention.

I know it sounds like a downer, but Anne started by touching upon grief in a larger sense. Her new book, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace, is a compilation of old and new essays on the subject of beauty in tight situations. Whatever it is that gives us struggle, Anne said that the people in our galaxy want us to get over it. She thought Small Victories could serve as a book we could hand one another when the going got tough.  “I wish the tradition was to sulk and not forgive and not let go and take it to the grave with you,” she told us- but that’s not the case.

Anne Lamott has her own strong foundation of faith, but I love how she leaves each person to their own belief systems (or lack thereof).  She quickly followed the Needing To Get Over It talk by announcing that she hates when people try to bumper sticker her moods with axioms like ‘Let Go and Let God’.  “Everything I let go of has claw marks in it,” she told the crowd.

From a writing perspective, she wanted us (the aspiring writers) to know that when it comes to inspiration, she almost never experiences it.  She instead told us that seeking inspiration is a way to keep her from getting her writing done. Further, she offered that half of creativity is taking half of everything out (I will refer you to her talk on “Shitty First Drafts“). You’ve got to hack away at what you create, because the rest of us are just not that interested. Ouch, but yeah.

Back to adversity: “the impeded stream is the one that sings.”  Anne takes the unseen a whole lot more seriously than the seen. Teasing out these aspects of life really is the most compelling, the hardest to talk about, and these are the parts of life where people are looking for the most help in navigating. That’s probably why she’s still got a sellout crowd on this Sunday afternoon where the Philadelphia Marathon has effectively shut down the city.

And now my favorite part of her talk: sometimes you just want to put on your stretch pants and get into bed with a chapter book.  She looks to books for comfort, and when her dad got sick with brain cancer, there wasn’t a single book on cancer to turn to. Death in the 1950s happened behind closed curtains, and she offers up that we need to write what we’d like to come upon.

“The great medicinal words of our culture are, ‘Me too’, and when I got sober and told horrible stories, I needed for women to tell me that they too had gotten bored, that maybe they didn’t even like their children.”  A little truth in the popular culture goes a long way.  She needs her alone time, and I think that as mothers (and now grandmothers, in her case), she guards her alone time.  “I go to my room with a copy of The New Yorker and the dog. I tell everyone “no one come in or I will hurt the dog.”  She is of course, 100% joking when she says this, but she lets the audience in on the reality that it is okay to have certain moments completely to yourself. And for those of you who still don’t believe me that she has no intention of hurting the dog, she spoke at length about how special her pets have been to her, and how they offer their own brand of healing.

Someone asked her about Brittany Maynard, the young woman with aggressive brain cancer who chose to die with dignity rather than wither away as the cancer reduced her quality of life.  Anne was asked if she thought euthanasia meant that person was giving up moments of grace. She didn’t think so. Brittany got to leave a body that was seizing, and she had a choice. With Anne’s father, he ended up like a toddler. She had promised him that he wouldn’t end up that way and yet this is exactly what happened.  “When I cross over, I’m headed straight for the dessert table,” she told the crowd. There is beauty in going out your own way.

On treating yourself kindly: “Let’s go overeat in a movie theater in the dark.”  This is something that she would say to her closest cousin. The things that you say to the people you love the most, this is also what you should be saying in the mirror.

And finally: Any freedom that I have ever had is from writing. If you’re a writer, you’ve got a golden ticket. Take it. Write. You have to do it.

“No one cares if you write it, but you’d better.”

If this doesn’t give you and me a kick in the ass, I’m not sure what will. For me, maybe just throw in a Kit Kat or a Junior Mint– we all need a little bit of help.