Quotes from Anne Lamott's Talk With My Commentary

Last night, I attended a talk by the wonderful Anne Lamott. She's a spry sixty-four and continues to tour regularly to promote her books and to give invited talks. She tends to ramble a bit and gives some canned talking points, but she's funny, compassionate, and passionate. The talk was part therapy, part advice, humorous, and altogether, entertaining.

(I have organized my notes here to read in a coherent fashion, because, like I said before, she had a tendency to ramble. The quotes are her words and the commentary is mine based on her talk and my personal thoughts.)

The three topics Lamott covered were: Mercy, Grace, and Writing.

She started out her talk with references to how exhausted she and others she knows have been since the election, and she had high praise for the Parkland students. In fact, she came back again and again to how she, personally, feels invigorated by seeing these young voices actively doing the right thing, no matter the personal cost. Lamott is well known for her activism, and it was wonderful to see how forthright she was about it. She did not shy away from offending the conservative among the audience—at sixty-four, she felt she had to kowtow to no one.

Mercy is not help. "Help is the sunny side of control." Ah! And there you have it—to me, the most significant nugget of her talk.

Using soup kitchens and care packages for the homeless as talking points, she addressed how even those who want to help go about it in a wrongheaded fashion. The correct attitude is to consider that we are all damaged, and what we want is the well-being and happiness of everyone, including ourselves. We need to focus more on that than on being right.

In other words, "Mercy is consciousness and intentionality. It is a heart for others' troubles."

Then she moved on to grace.

"Grace is life's WD-40 with a long red straw"—whenever you are stuck, it will get you out. Grace helps you realize that you cannot serve justice. Stop pretending fakeness and giving lip service to doing right by saying you want to be fair to all. "Fair [a fare] is where the pony rides are."

On grace: "The world does not have your self-respect to offer you. That is an inside job."

"Eighty-five percent of cacao is inedible"—it can be used to support rickety tables—"this is life." But it is that fifteen percent that is of import. What you do with it is of import. Life and writing are like driving at night with headlights on. You see only a little bit at a time, but you can make a whole journey that way.

She then ties in mercy and grace with: "Mercy is grace in action."

"As soon as someone can tell their truth and secrets to you, you have broken through and reached their heart. This is their salvation. Their stories heal them. They are like medicine."

Every March, I visit our local South Asian show called Yoni Ki Baat (The Vagina Monologues), where a small group of South Asian women come together to narrate their stories of innermost anguish. Every year, I go to witness their stories, to allow them to be heard and understood and accepted.

A throwaway: "Laughter is carbonated holiness." This reminded me strongly about His Holiness the Dalai Lama's discourses on happiness and laughter.

While Lamott referred to her books as the references cropped up organically in the talk, she never made it a point to sell them, and I really appreciated that.

The writing portion of the talk was canned advice. If you've read her Bird by Bird, you've heard it all. I bet she constantly gets asked questions about writing and the book, and she decided to forestall a lengthy Q&A by addressing it head-on. However, it didn't jive with the rest of the talk and felt tacked on.

She's a fan of the Indian American philosopher, J. Krishnamurti (1895–1986). When he was asked about his serenity in the face of everything life threw at him, he was famous for saying, "I don't mind."

How freeing! Not having expectations, not getting offended, not minding allows you to observe life and participate on your own terms. However, not minding is not to be confused with not caring. It is, in fact, quite the reverse. Not minding allows you to remove yourself from the equation and focus entirely on the other person.

Lamott underscored our inherent selfishness with this: "When kids do well, parents feel good about themselves." Instead of focusing on the child's achievement, the parents are patting themselves on the back.

"Teaching children destroys their creativity. They are so vulnerable and so strong and so free. When you tell a child, 'that is a bird,' thenceforward, they will only see the word 'bird.'" They will no longer see the beauty, the clean lines, the colors, the determination to succeed, to float, to fly, to soar. I was reminded about Richard Bach's book Jonathan Livingston Seagull and how Jonathan was committed to seeing beauty and perfection and beauty in perfection.

Her final words: "Pay attention! Look up, take off, soar, and land. Don't stay buried in a holes."

A sour note in her otherwise interesting presentation was her Orientalism. She exotified Indians and Asians, pigeonholing them with stereotypes and outright weirdness gathered from who knows where. Sigh! Given how much she talked about being woke, specifically using that term, she needs to do more work within to dismantle her own racism.