Anne Lamott Sighting
So I did a real grown up thing on Wednesday. I went to my first author book signing. I feel so old. I know it was no rite of passage, like getting a first kiss, a driver’s license or a life insurance policy, but it was definitely a sign that my youth is no longer with me. I am 35 years old, now. I am no longer a kid. What was more indicative of this terminal condition, is that I really enjoyed myself at a book signing, far more than that teenager in the back did, playing Temple Run on his iPad the whole time.
I went to see Anne Lamott talk about her newest book, Some Assembly Required: My Son’s First Son. It is a follow-up, or sequel of sorts, to the book she wrote about her son’s first year two decades ago.
Turns out she feels she needs to promote her newest book, even though it is rumored to open at #9 on the Bestseller List. I am sure her entertaining all of us on Wednesday has no direct impact on her book sales, but it impacts the indirect sales since on Thursday I told close to a hundred people that I saw Anne Lamott.
The event was held at the All Saints Church in Pasadena, it was the most beautiful church I’ve been to outside of Europe. Lamott spoke from the same podium the clergy would, and it really felt like church, though the object of our worship was slightly lower in the ecumenical chain of command. Since she and I are both openly Christian, it was a nice place for both of us to be.
She spoke. It was great. Turns out the narrator of her non-fiction works is the same person who writes them; the same one who lives in Marin County with her lovely pets, cornrows, and wit. I heard that some actors who play amazing roles on the screen are shy people and in reality are actually quite boring. They make such great actors because they get to let loose all the personality that they don’t have in real life. But this is not Anne Lamott. Who she was on that stage, speaking into that microphone, is the same lady in her books. Same wit, same charm, same comic timing.
The crowd laughed, including me, at every joke she said, because she is funny. She is a genius of sorts, though she would always deny not it, but secretly be thrilled. We are so over-excited and so wanted to please her and made sure she enjoys herself, so we laughed every time it was appropriate to laugh. She talked about being on tour, on writing a book with her son and her trip to India. She read a bit from the new book and then answered some decent questions.
The service broke up so Lamott could sign copies. Most of the audience got in an organized line like the adults they were, but they looked more like kids at an amusement park, waiting for an adrenaline rush, tightly holding on to their copies, checking and rechecking to make sure the book will open to correct page so Lamott will not have to be inconvenienced with 200 nervous pairs of hands flipping to the title page. Fans were given a few seconds, or for some, a full minute, to interact with her. She looked dog tired. She was loopy from being a mile up in Denver the previous night, and in sundry other cities over the last few days, ferried to and fro by agents or assistants or book store clerks. It is mostly women there. I tried to find some bond with the few men there, but I was too giddy to see one of my favorite writers. I thought condescendingly about the ridiculous private thoughts of the other fans and how they were too geeked to meet her, but I was embarrassed by my own geekedness, so I feigned apathy. I very calmly rejoiced then rejected all the things I might say to her. I met her. It was cool. I sounded like a gawky, pimply freshman trying to be debonair to the prom queen. I shook her hand, she signed my book and I headed home.
Yeah, yeah. The book is great. All her books are great, even the bad ones. She is so smart and wise and caring, and most of all, real. She accurately describes Life. Not Life for all of us, but for her. She invites us into all her yearnings and fears, all her strengths and weaknesses. She writes lucidly about all of the things she should be hiding so that we have some hope. Some hope that we will be Okay and will make it to the end.
She is also tends to be rude, disgusting and base, and that is the only way to tell the truth about life. My brother, the lawyer, said that being a lawyer is like making sausage: if you saw how it was made, you wouldn’t touch it again. She displays the example of her life in a way that leaves nothing back, though she does hit the reader on the head with it. She does it quite humbly, and with enough caring that we don’t lose hope. To think about Life in depth requires a strong constitution and if not handled properly, could lead to despair. Turns out, life is harsh. It is tough and at random can leave the strongest lying in puddles of their own fluids.
Exaggeration is a technique Lamott uses to make her stories funny and approachable. It actually makes them hilarious. Laughter can be a release of fear, and as the fear is leaving, it provides a lightening, which effects the release of inhaled air in short powerful bursts, in a similar manner that crying does. The shared symptoms are shaking, crying, staccato-like breaths involving both high and low vocal tones.
But this is not just a gimmick Lamott uses in her writing. It is a life gimmick that gets us through our fears. She is quite aware of the catastrophe of life, of how unbearably tragic it can be and sometimes is, and therein lies the genius of the exaggeration. The exaggeration helps to cope with the tragedies in her own life, or at least the faux pas, the slips and falls, the errors in judgment, etc.
From the starting point of what really happened, she takes it to a place where it could be real and quite tragic and painful, but is obviously not possible given the context and the tone.
About her son Sam from Operating Instructions: “Please, please, God, help him to be someone who feel compassion, who feels God’s presence loose in the world, who doesn’t give up on peace and justice and mercy for everyone. And then one second later, I was begging, Okay, skip all that s--t, forget it—just please, please let him outlive me.”
This is a chance to laugh, but this fear is real for her. Her father died. Her friend was dying during Sam’s first year and that makes the kid-dying fear all the more real her. It proved right in her face, in her living room, that death can really happen, even if you love someone and they are a good person.
Another story in Operating Instructions is when her son fell down the stairs. She exaggerated for effect. “I absolutely knew in those first few seconds that he had a spinal cord injury and that his head was going to swell up.” We get instant relief of our fears when we become aware that he did not have a spinal cord injury. We already know that because there is nothing in the book title, the introduction or preface, the back cover, our time the Internet, a friend’s comment, that tells us that she wrote a book about when her son got a spinal cord injury. We actually know he is fine immediately. It gives us a reminder of how bad life can be, how cruel nature is, and how consistent gravity is.
Our memories are instantly accessed during this moment and remember all the spinal cord injury stories, television specials and the real people we have seen in wheelchairs. It is in this moment that we are terribly afraid of life and terribly appreciative that her son did not actually receive such an injury. And for those of us living without spinal cord injuries in our lives, we are able to rejoice, even if it is for just a slightest bit, that no one in our lives has had this tragedy. Now I cannot speak for those living with spinal cord injuries, or those around them. If they are fresh injuries, it would be painful to read those words, and be derisive that Lamott could be so careless and wicked to mention something like that. But if the people have recently acclimated to their new world, then it is less careless of Lamott, though still insensitive. And if the person has lived for decades and jokes with their friends about “not standing for the anthem” or “I won’t be pushed around”, then they might just read through it, or even possibly smirk.
I cannot imagine that a personal who lives with a spinal cord injury in their life would ever get the same enjoyment that I got out of her little joke. It is really insensitive of her to do this, messing with our memories and our fears, all to help us release something and cause us to appreciate who we are in the very instant we read her writing. All my son has ever done is smack his head on the concrete driveway after falling off a step. He bled and cried, but none of his brains leaked out.
So to read her new book, Some Assembly Required: My Son’s Son, kinda requires a reader to read her first book Operating Instructions: A Journal of my Son’s First Year. It details the harsh reality of adjusting to the new world of taking care of a newborn, which from experience, is equally harsh and soft. Equally life-sucking and life-filling. Equal disaster and utopia. Catastrophe and splendor. But it also the journal of a single mother, ex-addict, who was on the edge of financial ruin, with her best friend and child-support staff member dying from cancer. Lamott was not ready physically, emotionally, financially, socially ready for the worst roommate ever: an 8-pound, illiterate, selfish crier whose ego pressed against the stratosphere. My son was much the same. But at least I had a spouse to hand him off to. But Lamott’s kid made her a better person. It was the worst trauma of her life, but it was exactly what she needed. That was clearly communicated in that book.
In the new book. Some Assembly Required, she chronicles her son’s illegitimate child, which was against her grand schemes for him, and the efforts of his girlfriend whose rocky relationship causes a separation between the parents, giving the newborn two homes to live in. Though it appears the dead-beat dad gene was not passed down to Sam Lamott, the circumstance are far from what she hoped would be.
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