On Meeting Anne Lamott

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.” ~Anne Lamott

For the last 23 years, I have told hundreds of first-year college students that Anne Lamott is my hero, reading to them from her iconic book Bird by Bird. I often quote her in my subsequent comments on their writing:

Almost all writing begins with terrible first efforts.

On a personal level, her words often come to mind:

* Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

* Help is the sunny side of control.

* No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life.

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Twenty-five years ago, I had the good fortune to attend a writer’s workshop on Martha’s Vineyard. Even though some of the other students didn’t seem to take the classes seriously (I had a roommate who said, “I’m just here to meet a man with a big boat!” and went to bed every night with Crest white strips on her teeth), I was all in. I read every word I was assigned. Against the backdrop of this beautiful island—in particular, its exaltations of hydrangeas and pairs of Adirondack chairs on every lawn, seemingly engaged in intimate conversation—I first devoured Bird by Bird.

Like so many people, I find the world filtered through Anne Lamott’s writing to be safer, saner, and fuller of hope and joy than it otherwise seems.

I got to hear her speak in 2007. “I am human,” she said, “and my heart is full of grief.” I felt seen, even in a packed audience hanging on to her every sentence.

Her book Operating Instructions about her son’s first year cut right to my soul even more than Bird by Bird. In those lonely infant years with my daughter, when so much felt like failure, it felt like forgiveness.

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When people say “bucket list,” I think of the song “There’s a Hole in the Bucket.” Or sometimes I picture a metal trashcan where bad ideas are tossed and burned in crumpled pyres. The notion of “things you do before you kick the bucket” is a cliché that I try not to dwell on too much. My dreams have always felt too expensive or wildly aspirational. Better not to hope.

One such wish, born of rooming with a girl from San José as a first-year student at Guilford College, was to visit Costa Rica. Years before I was part of an older and grayer cohort of serious bucket listers, back in 2004, my colleague Rachel and I planned to take a group of students there. I unexpectedly got pregnant with a due date that fell right in the middle of the trip and couldn’t go.

Almost twenty years later, I sat in my car in a strip mall parking lot during a desultory Virginia snowstorm wondering about the safety of the roads and scrolling through Instagram when I noticed an announcement for a retreat in Costa Rica with Neal Allen, a life coach who also happens to be married to Anne Lamott. I had been meeting weekly on Zoom with Neal for about a year after reading his book Shapes of Truth. He would sometimes mention his wife “Annie,” and her picture hung on the wall behind him in our meetings, but she still felt less like a real person and more like an abstract idea to me.

The announcement for the retreat stated that they would both be there and involved. I couldn’t believe it. A two-for-one actual bucket list event involving a place I’d always wanted to go and a person I’d always wanted to meet. Unfortunately, the dates fell right in the middle of my semester, and not the middle that included spring break. There was no way I could skip teaching for a week. I sighed. Better not to hope.

A month later, another announcement came around saying the dates had been changed to the week sandwiched between my daughter’s 18^th birthday and high school graduation (happening on the same day, the day before the retreat started) and my 55^th birthday (which would be the last day of the retreat). The cosmic synchrony felt almost too good to be true.

That May, the morning after my daughter became an adult and a high school graduate, I was on a plane from Richmond to Miami, and then on one from Miami to Costa Rica. Refusing to lug around more than one backpack, I carried with me only a change of clothes, a bathing suit, a tiny flashlight, mosquito repellent, a notebook, my twenty-five-year-old copy of Bird by Bird and two new copies of Operating Instructions.

~~

Instead of the hydrangeas and Adirondack chairs of tony Martha’s Vineyard, Costa Rica was humidity and howler monkeys, rough roads and the rocky shore of the Pacific. I stayed in a tiny hut with mosquito netting around the bed, every morning walking 200 steps up a steep incline to the main building of the Blue Spirit Resort in Nosara, on the west coast. Breakfast was fresh pineapple and tamarind juice, taken on the porch looking out at a grassy lawn and statue of Buddha. The top floor of the resort, where yoga happened after breakfast, had sweeping, open-air views, looking down over treetops and curling waves crashing against the beach far below. Except for the absence of my family and my dog, this felt like paradise.

An extreme introvert, I threw myself into daily interactions with strangers, refusing to sit by myself at mealtimes and gathering a group of people for free writing each afternoon. I wanted to rise to the occasion of what felt like an astonishing miracle.

There were about fifty of us, and everybody carried notebooks under their arms, pens at the ready. As charming, kind, and brilliant a man as Neal is, I knew many retreat-goers were there because of his wife.

I would see her, in line at breakfast, or standing in the doorway during one of Neal’s lectures, and emotion would ripple through me, part fear, part reverence. What was I afraid of? She seemed warm, funny, and indeed, human.

She gave a scheduled talk one evening, and chronically late person that I am, I arrived 20 minutes early and sat in the middle chair of the front row. I would not not make the most of this opportunity.

One day at lunchtime, a bit exhausted from asking different people at every meal, “Can I sit with you?” as I had promised myself I would, I sat alone, noticing a little toucan perched on a branch near my table.

Neal came over and sat down to ask me something about the writing group I was planning for that afternoon. I felt a bit on edge but not too alarmed. As I said, he is an exceptionally kind and interesting person with the obvious great good sense to marry the best person (with the possible exception of Dolly Parton) on the planet. But then his wife brought her tray over and suddenly I was having lunch with Anne Lamott. Neal got up to get his food, because apparently that’s what we were going to do, all eat lunch together, and I was left sitting there with a person I had admired for my entire adult life.

I knew my default would be to say nothing like a little scared rabbit. So I overcompensated. With a metaphor I thought she would find interesting in mind, I started babbling about the movie Wild Rose. “Have you seen it?” Desperate not to come across as an idiot, I was talking too fast. She shook her head. 

Oh god, I thought, remembering a former rockstar friend of mine explaining the way their bus driver would describe a street or parking lot he couldn’t maneuver the bus out of as a “funnel.” I was in a conversational funnel. I would have to explain the whole movie for the metaphor I wanted to share to make sense. And there wasn’t time! I had the impression that I could hold her attention for about four minutes, and that this was my one shot. To say the thing! To ask the thing!

“Well,” I continued, breathless, “it’s about this Scottish woman and she wants to be a famous singer so she abandons her kids and goes to Nashville to make it big but while she’s there she realizes that everyone else is there for the same reason and that really none of them is going to make it. So…”

I gulped some air and finished lamely, “It was really good,” knowing that she probably didn’t realize that in this scenario, she was Nashville, and we were all that Scottish singer with an unrealizable dream.

“Anyway,” I rushed, in a brilliant segue, “I was wondering, um, if you agree that writing can be learned but not taught?”

“Hmm,” she said, “I don’t think in those terms.”

Dammit, another funnel. “Well, um… I love the way you say that writers shouldn’t ask themselves, ‘What can I write about?’ but should ask, ‘What do I care about?’ and find a way to write about that, whatever it is.”

“Oh, I didn’t say that. But I like it.”

What.

I’d been quoting her for decades on this point, multiple times a semester. Who did say that, if not her? Cheryl Strayed? Pam Houston? Natalie Goldberg? My brilliant friend Valley? Did I, somewhere along the way, say that?

Neal returned with lunch, but they departed almost immediately, called to their duties of running the retreat. I looked over at the toucan, dipping his long beak under black wings to hide what I imagined was uncontrollable laughter at my ineptitude.

~~

That afternoon, five of us sat at a big wooden table in the dining hall, feeling like we were floating among the trees, writing and sharing. I ruminated in one 10-minute free writing about how Neal’s workshop might be different mediated through a female leader’s perspective. After I read aloud what I had written, I noticed through peripheral vision someone rising from an adjoining couch and disappearing up the stairs.

Later, at dinner, one of the writers from the afternoon casually said, “Oh I think Anne Lamott was listening to us. She was sitting on that couch.” I wanted to cry. What if she thought I was being critical of her husband? Or worse, that I was some kind of malcontent? A retreat Karen? “I didn’t mean anything by it!” I wanted to scream. “I was just thinking on paper!” But there was no one to hear me, or understand.

Rushing in on a wave of shame came fleets of memories of speaking at the wrong time, or saying the wrong thing. I felt trapped in a web I had spun myself.

I had hoped, and I had gotten myself here, but nothing, really, had changed.

~~

I gathered myself and kept showing up for the rest of the retreat. I couldn’t turn back the hands of time and write about something different, or talk more quietly, or notice—for the love of God—that I was sitting close enough for Anne Lamott to hear me.

I even asked her if she would sign my books for me, and of course, she agreed. Did I imagine the absence of warmth?

I wanted her to sign Bird by Bird for my daughter, off to college in the fall, a gift that would connect her to so much of what I held sacred and believed to be true. I had brought Operating Instructions for a “little girl” from my nannying days, now in her 30s and about to have her second son, and my boss, mother of a boy toddler, who had helped me pay for my trip to Costa Rica.

“When would be a good time?” I almost whispered to her in line for breakfast, my face warm.

“Um, maybe lunch?” she said.

I brought my three books to lunch and waited nervously for their author to appear. Sitting with me was a woman who said she felt deeply connected to Lamott’s story of being a single mother. She herself was raising a son, two years old. “I didn’t realize how alike we are,” she said.

I saw Anne Lamott walk past us to the same spot where I had babbled so embarrassingly the day before. “How do you spell your last name?” I asked my companion.

After she told me, I took my books to the table near the toucan tree, asking for one copy of Operating Instructions to be signed for my new friend from the retreat instead of my boss. It felt part of the cosmic synchrony to do so.

When I handed her my worn and dog-eared copy of Bird by Bird, I burst into tears, thinking of my daughter reading it at her dorm room desk, all that wisdom spilling out around her in a pool of shimmering light, protective and affirming.

~~

Over the summer, at two different songwriting camps, my husband got to meet his musical heroes, Americana-style troubadours Todd Snider and Rhett Miller. I was jealous of his accounts of late nights with them, hanging out together, playing guitar and telling stories.

That kind of connection didn’t happen for me in my own hero-meeting experience. Ironically, the theme of the retreat was “taming the inner critic,” but all I could think was that if a person who speaks so often about the power of love, forgiveness, and friendship had no warmth for or interest in me, what does that say? Do I now have proof of some fundamental personal flaw I’ve suspected all along? Or another stitch in a vast tapestry of disappointments called “When Things Didn’t Go as Hoped?” Or maybe I just have a reminder that I’m not the only extreme introvert in the world, quickly and deeply exhausted by too much human interaction.

In the end, neither of the books I brought back from the retreat made it to their intended homes. Operating Instructions sits on a shelf next to my fireplace. The young woman I had it signed for lost her son at 27 weeks, just after I got back from Costa Rica. Every time I see its blue cover, I feel a little sad and a little guilty. What is my tiny disappointment in the face of that cruelest crush of hope?

My daughter, of course, forgot to take Bird by Bird to school with her. Maybe that’s because college is about figuring out your own hopes and finding your own heroes.

Somehow this book that is so important to me ended up in a pile on the third-row seat of my old GMC Yukon that I don’t drive much anymore. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of it waiting there, the red parts of the cover faded to pink, and think about where we’ve been together.

~~