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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With us now, Anne Lamott, who has been such an inspiration to so many people over many years. She is just out with her 20th book. It's called Somehow: Thoughts on Love. Maybe Anne Lamott has helped you through early parenting with her book Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, or helped you as a writer or just as a human being with her classic Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Or maybe you've seen her 2017 TED Talk, viewed around 7 million times by now, called Twelve Truths I Learned from Life and Writing. For example--

Anne Lamott: Number 10, [laughter] grace. Grace is spiritual, WD 40, or water wings. The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as he or she loves your new grandchild. Go figure. [laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Yes, go figure, but not hard to figure that love would figure in book number 20 as it did in that truth number 10, so it's Somehow: Thoughts on Love. Besides being an author of books, Anne Lamott is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, where she's been very active lately, writing about things like turning 70 not being so strange, and finding love at 63. I'm so glad she joins us now. Anne, thank you for coming on the show again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Anne Lamott: I'm so happy to be here, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Anne, Thoughts on Love. I'm struck by how many kinds of love you reference in this book; family love, community love, love of music, God's love as in that TED Talk clip. Is it a decent place to start to ask love is not actually just one emotion, is it?

Anne Lamott: No, it's not. It's a number of things. I started out wanting to just write a book. I was going to call it PS, sort of last-minute things that I hadn't written about anywhere else. I wanted to write a book for my son and my grandson about everything that had ever worked during really hard, scary times before and it would almost certainly work again after I'm gone, when climate change and the possible end of democracy are part of the environment for them. Everything I wrote had to do with love. I wrote about love accidentally. I actually stopped myself and said, "Oh, God, this is even too California for me," but by then, I was--

Brian Lehrer: You who live in Marin, of all places, outside San Francisco.

Anne Lamott: Yes. I just went ahead with it. It was about community love, what Martin Luther King calls the precious community. It was about romantic love. I got married three days after I started getting Social Security. It was about everything around us that seems ultimately to have to do with love. It's sometimes very distressing guises.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a couple of calls in our available time from Anne Lamott fans. If there's anything you always wanted to ask Anne Lamott but never had her over for dinner or never attended her Sunday school class, now's your chance. 212-433-WNYC. We'll have time for just a couple, but 212-433-9692 if you want to get in.

Does it strike you as weird or somehow imbalanced with all the kinds of love that you write about in this book that so much of popular culture, movies, songs, TV shows, whatever, is about one kind of love, romantic love?

Anne Lamott: Definitely, and also that usually what they portray is just a total crock. Life and love are not like the movies and the advertisements. Life is very real. Life gets very, very lifey. It's not like on TV. The ancient Greeks called God "the really real." That's the God I'm most interested in. I'm not interested in this happy horse poo about how well things will go if you just begin to use this or buy this or lease it or date it or drive it. It's not helpful.

I didn't want to write a book about stuff that was just the great palace lies, that safety and respect and fullness are out there and can be purchased or leased. It's an inside job. That's what I wanted to write about for my son and grandson.

Brian Lehrer: About that TED Talk clip we played, I know it's short and out of context, but can you expand on how it might relate to the book? Could God, if there is a God, love Vladimir Putin and Henry Kissinger as much as she or he or they loves a newborn grandchild?

Anne Lamott: Well, I think that's a mystery of grace. A lot of days, I struggle. A lot of days with Trump are just way too long, but I think that is the truth of grace. I think that everyone gets into heaven, even Henry Kissinger and other war criminals. I mean that nicely. I don't think you're immediately shepherded into the dessert table. I think probably you've got some cleaning up to do in the anteroom before you come in fully, but yes, I think God only loves. I think God loves, period. That's what I teach my Sunday School kids.

I don't think God has an app for not love, but I think not love is killing us. I have done, and especially, I think, in my last book, talked about my own hatred. Martin Luther King said, "Don't let them get you to hate them, because when you do, you've become them." You become Trump and you've become Bannon, and you've become Marjorie Taylor Greene. You've also lost your center. You've lost the place inside of you where there's a glade, where you're centered in you're breathing and you're looking around and you actually notice how many things still work and are filling and nourishing.

When I first got sober, which was 1986, someone said to me, "If you've got a problem, go look in the mirror." I actually had these temporary tattoos made up that said, "It's not them." In around approximately 2016, November, I lost my mind, but I knew that what I had to do was do the deep dive into my own madness and my own hatred, my own judgment of people that don't look like me or vote like me. I ended up being able to find a maybe shaky peace, no matter what was happening out there in the Republican Party and MAGA, and instead, to do what I could to be a person of goodness, which is a very good acronym for God.

On any given day, what I might do is to go around the neighborhood and pick up litter or to make a decision to just flirt with every very old person I saw that day, even in the express line at Whole Foods with old people with coupons. I mean, that's grad school, right? I'd say, "I like a man in a hat," [chuckles] or whatever I could come up with. In that way, I would transform my anxiety and judgment and hostilities into warmth and friendliness, which is ultimately what love is.

Brian Lehrer: As kind of a follow-up to that, a listener writes, "I understand that God loves Putin and Kissinger the same. How does that help you to love the Putins in your life? What does that look like?" I think that's a question about your personal life, not the kind of political context you were just talking about. I note that in the book on family love, you say, "Sweet family love entangled by history, need, frustration, and annoyance." Some kind of love are complicated. How do you apply that same lesson in your personal life? A listener wants to know.

Anne Lamott: Well, that's a great question. I could actually write a whole book about it, or I guess I just did. You start where you are and with the people that are making you feel so frightened or diminished, and you do the inside work of connecting with yourself and being very friendly with yourself. My friend, a diocesan priest in LA, Terry Ritchie, said, "The point is not to try harder but to resist less."

What I tend to do is I have to surrender, I have to put down my weapons. The Buddhists say, "Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?" I want to be right. I think I am right, but we don't notice how angry we are, we just notice that we're right. If we start doing the work of looking in the mirror and deciding whether or not we want to live this way then it becomes a lot easier to, as I said, put down the weapons and breathe and get outside and pick up litter and just assume that I can't do anything about Putin and Steve Bannon, but I can do something about me. I can pour myself into the common good.

A lot of the pieces somehow have to do with finding out just how mentally ill I was on any given day, and pushing back my sleeves, and seeing if I could breathe- left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, is pretty much my mantra, and then get outside and look up and see who needs me.

I had a pastor, years ago, who said you can trap bees in the bottom of mason jars without lids on them because the bees don't think to look up, they just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls of the jar. If they look up, they could fly away. I always get up. I take the action and the insight follows, that I'm not going to change Putin's feelings today. I'm not going to change anything, but I can change me. That can be quantum. I can make my own little emotional acre and galaxy a little bit sweeter than it was.

Brian Lehrer: One more clip from your TED Talk. This one is from right at the beginning when you're setting up the idea of identifying 12 truths that we might extract from the jumble of our lives.

Anne Lamott: There's so little truth in the popular culture, and it's good to be sure of a few things. For instance, I am no longer 47, although this is the age I feel and the age I like to think of myself as being. My friend Paul used to say in his late 70s that he felt like a young man with something really wrong with him. [laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Very funny. You write and speak about aging these days. I think your recent Washington Post column called It's not so strange to be 70, and you just turned 70 last month, happy birthday, has been shared a lot. Did you think it would be strange?

Anne Lamott: I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict. I was surprised to see 21. I thought that was very strange. Then 30 and then 40. I had a five-year-old at 40. Every step of the way, it's been strange to still be alive. Sometimes it feels like there's a sniper in the tree because it's picked off so many of my younger friends. Here I am, lurching and flailing along with stronger and stronger glasses. I'm about to get hearing aids, and my feet hurt, and my hip hurts, and whatnot, and I'm happier than I've ever been in my whole life.

Brian Lehrer: Anne Lamott, good place to end, as she continues to help us understand ourselves and our place in this complicated paradoxical, dread and ecstasy-filled world with her newest book Somehow: Thoughts on Love. Thank you so much for sharing some of it with us.

Anne Lamott: Oh, Brian. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More to come.

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