Best-selling novelist Anne Lamott talks about big subjects that she emphasizes with capital letters — Alcoholism, Motherhood and Jesus as well as things most of us avoid talking about like depression, grief, addiction and shame.
She’ll be in Charleston later this month to give a leading presentation at the Lowcountry Mental Health Conference when it opens July 27 at the Charleston Gaillard Center.
“What I like to talk about is how we come through, how we bear up under, incredibly,” Lamott said in an exclusive interview with the Charleston City Paper. “Whether that’s national, or it’s at the dining room table, or it’s alone with our own selves. I love to talk about what really works, which is, I think, telling the truth. What really doesn’t work is trying to appear to be doing just fine when you’re not.”
In addition to Lamott, the Lowcountry Mental Health Conference will include keynote presentations from a variety of thought leaders and professionals in the mental health field. Among those leading conversations will be experts in trauma, counselors, social workers, psychologists and authors.
Lamott’s writing includes brutal honesty, humor
Lamott’s work is largely autobiographical. With brutal honesty and a self-effacing sense of humor, she talks about her struggles and rising above them. She said she is 37 years sober and describes herself today as an “unabashed, extremely left-wing Christian.”
She wrote her first book Hard Laughter in 1979 for her father, also a writer, who died of brain cancer. It was “a present to someone I loved who was going to die.”
Loss is a frequent topic in her work, including the loss of loved ones, the loss of personal power and the transformative wisdom that we gain in those painful moments.
“My dad got sick when I was 23 and died when I was 25. And that was the end of the world. I learned, first of all, that I could survive that — barely at first, but I could survive it.”
Lamott said writing Hard Laughter helped her to get through her grief.
“It’s an account of that experience and what helped me, including really hard laughter, telling the truth and just bearing the pain with a couple of deeply trusted friends. … Pain shared is pain divided.”
Constantly writing and speaking on the topic, she’s become known as someone others turn to for guidance on grief. (For a 20-minute introduction to Lamott’s spiritual philosophy, especially as it concerns death, see her appearance on episode 2 of the surrealist animated Netflix series, The Midnight Gospel.)
“I started to share my experience, strength and hope with other people who are going through loss. I was ever after immersed in that conversation: What do you do at the end of the world, and what’s the gift of coming through?’ ”
Devoted to existential questions
She’s spent the last 40 years of her career devoted to exploring such existential questions, delivering her findings with honesty and compassion rather than attempting to gloss over the pain, frustration and disappointment.
“For me, it happened early and hard, and I learned that talking about it is really 80% of the solution. The transformation is that you become a person of compassion. You become a person who has this medicine to share with others.
“And all human lives have a lot of loss and grief and disappointment, everyone,” she said. “Everyone has experienced a loss of a dream, if not the loss of a person. [Loss] also ends the illusion that you’re in control of much of anything. And that’s a great blessing.”
In her most recent novel, Dusk Night Dawn, (2021), Lamott writes about contemporary issues of life and faith, including climate change, politics and personal challenges, such as adjusting to newly married life at 66.
“Yes, these are times of great illness and distress,” the back cover reads, “and yet the center may just hold.”
In Dusk Night Dawn, Lamott questions how we stumble through times that seem increasingly bleak. We begin, she says, by accepting our flaws and embracing our humanity on both a personal and collective scale.
Now in her “third third of life,” Lamott has found tools to reduce, distract and dilute the shame and dread our worried souls deal with. She’ll share some of these tools in her July 27 talk.
“I’ve thrown so much stuff out of the psychic airplane, so many boxes that I always lugged around with me, that stuff I cared about that I really don’t care that much about anymore, like what people think about me or say about me or expect of me. And that’s one of the great blessings of getting older, is that you just can’t lug that around anymore.
“You just don’t have the time or the acuity to judge as often or as harshly. I call it the grace of myopia.”
Anne Lamott will give a keynote presentation at 10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. July 27 at the Lowcountry Mental Health Conference, followed by a book signing at the Charleston Gaillard Center presented in collaboration with Buxton Books. Visit lowcountrymhconference.org to learn more and register.
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