First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Anne Lamott about her new essay collection, Somehow.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: When you feel like you do have a secret, and it’s tearing you apart in some way, even if you don’t realize it right away, does writing play any role for you in either getting it out or understanding it?
Anne Lamott: Well, that’s a great question. Not writing so much, but reading, because when I’m reading somebody’s book, and they’re sharing a secret, whether it’s fictional or memoir, and it’s really deep and core to being human and I see myself in the mirror that they’re holding up, I am flooded with relief, and I’m flooded with gratitude for the courage to tell that secret. And you know, people say, Oh, you say stuff that I’ve only thought or I’ve never said that out loud, or whatever. But the stuff that I write, the stuff I present in my work is stuff I know is universal, that I’ve been talking about for a long time with a lot of different people. The stuff that is intimate I share with my son or Neil or with a friend. But this stuff is so universal, that we’re all you know, scared. Sometimes we all screw up, we’re all a little screwed up. We’re all really damaged in some ways. It’s a long road back from certain kinds of scary childhoods. We’re all floundering a lot. We all have done damage to other people that we haven’t sought forgiveness for. We’ve been holding grudges, we’re really manipulative, or petty or materialistic or ambitious. We’re all this stuff. But we all are. And so, I love to say something in a book that I haven’t said before, that seems really deep and universal, but that I haven’t said out loud on paper. And I love it. It’s thrilling, because I wouldn’t say it if I thought there would be a backlash against me, and people would stop coming to my events. But I say it because everyone I’ve ever said it to before has gotten it, you know, just grokked it and said, oh God, me too. I’ve done that, I have that, what do you do about it, or what I’ve tried is, so I love it. And I do think we are as sick as our secrets. And not everybody knows all my secrets. But somebody knows all my secrets. Not always the same person. I do believe that’s how we heal.
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Anne Lamott is the author of 20 books, which include fiction and nonfiction. Her novels include Hard Laughter, Blue Shoe, and Imperfect Birds. Her nonfiction titles include Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope and the newly released Somehow: Thoughts on Love. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2010.
