Interview with Anne Lamott, published in Utne Reader, May-June, 1999     Another version of it was published in Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak About Their Writing and Their Faith. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, March 2006.
 
Linda Buturian

1)    Which fiction writers do you like to read?
John Grisham’s a perfect travel fiction writer.  He’s a Baptist.  And the new book is much less law, much more dark night of the soul for the main character.  I love A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton.  I love Alice Munro, and Alice Adams, but she’s my friend so I don’t know if that counts.  I like the novel Midwives by Bohjalian.  I read a lot of poetry.  People send me poems.  Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, Rumi, Cavafy the Greek poet.  

2)    What books do you like to read with your son Sam?
I really love all the E.B. White books, although I find them almost unbearably poignant, and we both sob at the end of Charlotte’s Web.  We  love Roald Dall though I hate his politics of course. 

3)    Regarding funny Christian writers.  Know any others? 
C.S. Lewis is great.  He’s not goofy-funny, but he’s so droll and interesting.  Frederick Beuchner is a wonderful Christian writer who has a terrific sense of humor.  Most of the Christian writing is not classically funny, although sometimes on the Christian station, especially the AM Christian station, which is much looser than the FM, they have speakers who are really hilarious.  They’ll have women on in the afternoon who give a half hour pitch and it will be like Erma Bombeck but overtly Christian and self deprecating. 

It’s interesting to me that there aren’t a lot of funny Christian writers.  I think it will change and you will help it change, because of your honesty and humor and the fact that you’re accepted among a lot of Christians.

I’m accepted among the left wing Christians

Calvin college invited  you to take part in a conference on faith and writing.  They’re Calvinist. 

First of all, it’s such a joy to laugh and I think a lot of us feel if God doesn’t have a sense of humor we are just so doomed.  Christians that aren’t really hard core fundamentalist must feel that if they’re going to get a whole segment of the population, they better start having some sense of humor, because it’s such a turn-off to hear this earnest, judgmental line. 

4)    I’ve found it hard to write about my faith in fiction.  It’s easier in my non-fiction.  I like the characters you’ve given belief to in your novels: Rae in Crooked Little Heart, and Marie in All New People.  They are human, susceptible to disbelief by others, vulnerable to ridicule, but true in their childlike faith.  How do you do it?

Well, I do it like I do everything, with a lot of false starts and really awful first drafts.  With both of those two characters, Marie and Rae, there was a lot more in about their Christianity and I took so much of it out because it sounded pontificating and flat-footed.  It is hard to write about faith without coming across as proselytizing and too earnest or self-satisfied which I just can’t stand.  So I go out of my way not to lay that trip on people, not because I care that they know I’m a Christian, which everybody who reads me knows now, but because it’s just such bad writing mostly.  So anything that has stayed in has stayed in only because it wasn’t as bad as the stuff that got taken out.  Rae has such a nice sense of humor and the people in the Ferguson family tease her so much.  Marie just doesn’t care.  Rae and Marie’s family and best friends tease them and my family and best friends tease me but it’s pretty dental.  I’m not ever really attacked. 

It’s just like real life where you do your walk, you let people know what you’re doing.  When people ask what I’m going to do about something I don’t not say that I’m going to pray and meditate, meditate in the sense of probably looking up scripture and thinking about stuff and talking to the pastor and then thinking some more.  I don’t not mention that that’s what I’m going to do.  In fact I do mention that that’s what I’m going to do but partly just to annoy everyone.  But at the same time, when I write about it it just tends to sound like what I hate most in the world, which is people that seem to have all the answers who then make everybody else feel like they’re not doing as well.  So I write a lot then I take out all but the stuff that I really love.

5)    I am somewhat of an insomniac.  The other night I was lying awake obsessing about some inane thing, and all of a sudden I imagined myself as a child in God’s family, and I saw myself as a six year old, worrying her blanket and afraid of everything, especially the dark.  When you lie awake at night, what kind of child are you in the family of God?  How old do you feel?

I’ve had a bad time sleeping since I was four or five.  I’ve always been somebody who’s had pretty tough nights to get through.  I don’t really feel like a child with an age when I can’t sleep, I just feel like a person in such need and I feel stricken and so lousy.  A lot of us were raised thinking that we were bringing stuff on ourselves.  If I was having a hard time sleeping, someone was apt to tell me just to relax and, you know, I’ve been sober for a long time and a Christian for even longer.  I have a lot of tools and skills, a lot of self-hypnosis and relaxation skills, and I often still can’t sleep.  I don’t feel like a two year old or a four year old or a 45 year old which I will be next month, but I just feel like a child of God, like somebody who is really really challenged in this one area and it’s awful. 

One of the reasons I’m so raggedy today is that I was awake and not in my own bed last night, wherever I was--I can’t even remember—St. Louis.  I had to get up really early to come  here, and of course I’m on California time so I’m already way off kilter, and literally for the life of me I couldn’t sleep.  Then of course the panic was kicking in and the trying to self will myself into falling asleep, and the efforts to control something that is like a force of nature.  Through it all, on top of it, there was a voice that was like the feminine side of God, the mother side, the very very gentle stroking side.  I also feel Jesus lying in bed with me quite a lot, stroking my shoulders very gently, and I was just reminding myself that if I couldn’t fall asleep at all, that I would get through today no matter what.  That nothing, not principalities or insomnia, could separate me from the love and the strength of God, and that I’ve had a lot of practice not feeling very good.

A lot of times I feel about eleven.  Sort of pre-pubescent, where I don’t feel like a snappy kid who’s trying to experiment with her image and sexuality, but rather someone who’s right on the cusp of that who doesn’t feel like an anything yet.  Who doesn’t feel like a kid anymore and certainly doesn’t feel like a young woman or young teenager.  I feel kind of in that limbo land of not having any identity particularly, but that’s not always a bad thing.  It means that I can just be a little bit formless and a little bit outside of that need to have an image or a definition to hang it
all on. 

A friend of mine says, gently, that I’m a narcissist at night.  He’s right.  There’s no god outside of my mind.

I’ve had a lifetime of people projecting their shit on me because they sleep well. I’m very active in recovery and people that have 25 and 30 years will say, “Well no one ever died from lack of sleep.”  And I have had it with people’s opinion about this thing I have.  I have felt spiritually given a gift that they don’t have that they won’t get because they put their head down at eleven and they fall asleep.  Also I refuse to lay a creepy trip on people if they’re real fat or they can’t get their food life together or if they have a hard time with depression.  I don’t feel like “wow, you know, you’re not working your program, why don’t you turn to God.”  It’s so sick, so mean, and it’s why I love Jesus so much.  I don’t think Jesus would ever say that no one ever died from lack of sleep.  Jesus doesn’t see that I’m being a pain in the ass or that I’m trapped in my overactive mind,  Jesus just sees my pain. 

It’s like when he’s on the cross with the crooks on either side of him, and one of them is saying what a joke he is and what a sorry-ass excuse for a savior if he can’t even save himself, and the other thief just really gets it and he says this guy didn’t do anything wrong, he just deserves compassion, because he’s in this awful situation, it’s frightening.  So one of them is very moved and its so nurturing to Jesus for somebody to have that compassionate response to him instead of that derision. 

I’ve had many men in my life and they were all good sleepers.  I’ve never been with a man who slept like I did, and most of my girlfriends are good sleepers----most of the people I’m close to have other stuff: they’re anorexic or they’re fat or they can’t get their careers jumpstarted and I don’t say, “Well for god’s sake why don’t you just do this or do that.”  I just say, “It’s really hard and we do it imperfectly.  I know what that feels like, its lonely and very odd and God loves you exactly the same when you’re in what somebody else might call a narcissistic trance, that’s when you’re nursing your baby.  It’s all the same to God, God just sees the need.”

It’s like that hymn, not the famous “Amazing Grace,” but that hymn that goes “Amazing grace will always be the song I sing, for it was grace that bought my liberty.”  The chorus says, “He looked beyond my wants and saw my needs.”  God looks beyond our craving or our rage at not falling asleep or whatever the mental turmoil or the agitation is, and he doesn’t see that you’re blowing it or that you’re not doing a good job being you, it’s part of what makes you you, and he’s not here to take it away.  I don’t even think he’s here to get you to sleep.  He’s here to fill it with his love and his tenderness and his company, his presence.  That’s why we’re Christians. 

6)    Let’s talk about the evil man and the dog in Traveling Mercies.  I made the mistake of reading that story before I went to sleep, so I lay awake worrying about the retriever.  I like how you pursued God’s love to its radical end.  That’s what’s amazing about Jesus; he loves that sick man as much as he loves me, Adolph, etc.  But, like T.S. Eliot says, “All time is eternally present.”  And I’m frozen in that bad moment on the beach with the man hurting the dog, and I really wanted to go with you when you told your son Sam that the dog wouldn’t always be with that man.  I want to know where that hope comes from, because I think all of us, on some level, are frozen in a moment of terror and we’re waiting for the heat and light of grace to release us. 

I’m not sure that what I meant was that the dog would ever get away from that man.  What I meant was that the dog’s life with that man was a drop in the bucket, and that the dog had such a dignity and presence about him.  I don’t overthink things like whether pets go to heaven, but I assume that if there are no pets in heaven I’m hardly interested.  I mean just barely.  I feel that all souls are eternally present too, that there’s God’s love and that there’s stuff that appears to not be a part of God’s love but it’s just because I don’t have the eyes to see and the breadth of understanding or of perception. 

It’s like this man that had the dog is also a child of God and the mystery is that God loves that man that was abusing the dog.  I don’t think the man is satanic and not worthy of God’s love.  I don’t think John King, the guy who did that horrible racist crime, is not one of God’s children.  It’s a child that causes God such grief and heartbrokenness over what our condition is.  It’s our condition taken to the nth degree, our condition without having had as much love as we managed to find.  It’s who we are with a biochemistry that was so vulnerable to acting out stuff so violently, which I don’t do.  I might yank Sam’s arm but that’s about the worst and I’m not proud of it, but it’s a pretty big distance between what I do and what John King did.  But at the same time I just have to believe that God loves John King and holds him in his heart and that when John King dies, which I hope will not be by lethal injection, he will have a soul with a spark of divinity in it, and it will be reunited with the source of that, and the part that was his personality, or the wound that made him be a person capable of atrocity, will be behind him.  Whatever happened in his family or in his blood chemistry that made this way of being on the earth his reality is not who he is eternally.  It’s who he is personality and character wise.  He wasn’t born that way, he was born like your baby or mine.  I believe he came here just fine, and he may have had a predisposition to craziness and violence that was treatable by drugs and therapy.  But he wasn’t living in a household and culture that got him the help he needed.  Somebody that we might raise even without vast wealth would still have access to help.  We would know that our child needed to get more coaching than we were capable of providing and it would be possible to turn it around. 

I just believe that Jesus doesn’t say you should love everybody unless they kill somebody or unless they’re really cruel to a dumb pet.  Jesus doesn’t say that, he just says I’m really sorry there are no loopholes.  You can hate what these people do and you have to love them or you’re delusional and you’re thinking you are better than and the truth is that we’ve all sinned and fallen short.  You love this guy anyway and you pray for him and hold space for him to find his way home too because he seems to have gotten very badly lost along the way. 

I don’t know that that dog will ever get away from that man.  I think its possible that that dog will get killed by the man, and the man is going to aggravate the wrong person and get killed himself, but you see those pictures on the news of the children who are being beaten very savagely and the county worker comes to separate them from their parent and the children just lose their minds, so it might have been that the dog would just be even more bereft if separated from that very familiar sadist.  I don’t think sadism means your not worthy of God’s love, because we have sadism inside of our beings.  It’s part of what it means to be human, is cruelty. 

7)    What do you want to convey to Sam about God?
I want to convey that we get to be human.  We get to make awful mistakes and fall short of who we hope we’re going to turn out to be, and that we don’t have to be what anybody else tried to get us to be so they could try to feel better about who they were.   We get to screw up right and left and we try to keep finding our way back home to goodness and kindness and compassion.  That is actually an even deeper stream that runs through us and it’s the stream that flows home to God and that flows from God through us daily, bringing with it the living water of life and of hydration and of tears and of that which waters the garden.  You get to screw up and if your lucky you feel the pain of that.  It’s like the line I quoted in a book, “that we’re not punished for the sin but by the sin.”  If you’re lucky you can stay open enough to life and present enough to feel awful when you really screw up and that when you do, the solution is not to try to pump yourself out of it by trying to amass some more power, but instead to get very surrendered and humbled like it talks about in the last lines of the chapter of Micah, “To walk humbly with your God and to try to love justice and mercy. “  To be a part of that instead of the power and the domination and the ego.  I want him to know that no matter what happens he’s never going to have to walk alone, and that God, as I understand God, does not talk loudly, in audible or profoundly mysterious ways, but that God speaks through the love of our friends and the love of the people who write--who wrote the Bible and who write the most brilliant stuff that we’re going to come upon that resonates with truth.  It’s like that wonderful line, “the spirit rejoices in hearing what it already knows.”   There is love and intelligence beyond all understanding that animates wonderful writing and art and music.  And we hear God there and we see God in the faces of the people we love whether we ever see them again or not.  That’s what I’m trying to convey to Sam.