Lamott: People Loving You – The 'Great Miracle'

CHICAGO, IL (April 5, 2004) - When she was pregnant with her son Sam in 1989, writer Anne Lamott began looking for a book to tell what she could expect in her first year as a parent.

What she found were books written by happy parents who "were doing well," who said things like, "Well, children with colic can be a challenge." For Lamott, life as a single parent - going three and four nights at a time without sleep following Sam's birth - was almost more than she could bear.

"What I was looking for when I had a newborn was someone to tell me the truth – that some days are just too long, and you are going to go crazier than you could ever imagine," said Lamott, who spoke to a crowd of more than 500 people at North Park University Thursday night.

She began writing down her experiences in a journal, which later became her best-selling book Operating Instructions. The book details Lamott's first year as a parent, her own struggles with her new found Christian faith and the pain of watching her best friend Pam die of cancer.

Lamott's complete honesty about her own failings and struggles with faith and parenthood strikes a chord with readers who are tired of pretending that everything is all right in their lives. In Lamott, they found someone who could say all the things they had thought, but were too afraid to say out loud.

Since Operating Instructions, Lamott has written three novels - Rosie, Crooked Little Heart and Blue Shoe and two non-fiction books - Bird by Bird and Traveling Mercies. They are all about the same things, Lamott told students and others gathered in North Park's Anderson Chapel.

"Families, loss, sticking together, community and the miracle that people can get to know you and still love you," she said, "that to me is the great miracle."

The North Park 2004 campus theme is "Community" and first-year students had been required to read Traveling Mercies this past fall. Lamott said that being vulnerable and depending on each other are essential parts of community. She stressed what she called the "two great miracles of life."

"The second great miracle is Jesus," she said. "But the first great miracle to me is that you can let people know you intimately - who you really are - and they love you anyway. That's going to be the one I will go to my grave not understanding."

Lamott, who is unabashedly Christian, said that it is easy to believe that Jesus loves us. "He loves everybody," she said. "If you were the only person on earth, he would still have died for you - so it's not much of a stretch for him to love me," she added. " I am just sort of medium awful - I am not that bad." Plus she added, Jesus promised to love us. "And I hold him to that.

"But your friends and family see the darker, icky, angry parts that are totally unacceptable in the culture," Lamott continued, "and they not only love you, they usually love you more deeply. They love you and they are grateful and they trust you because they believe you can see the less adorable parts of their humanity and still love them."

Jen Pope, who coordinates North Park's campus theme program, said she was pleased at the standing-room-only crowd at Lamott's speech. Even after the event sold out, she received calls from people wanting to attend. "They left messages saying, 'I'm sorry to hear it's sold out, but I just want to let you know what Anne Lamott has meant for my life.'"

Thursday night's audience was treated to a reading of a work in progress from Lamott's upcoming book on essays on faith, to be published next spring. The piece described a walk she took with Sam, who is now nearly 15 - the typical struggles over homework and laundry that parents and teens often have.

""I look at the C-minus on his progress report and I see him at 30 taking orders at Taco Bell," she said. "Then I look at his handwriting and I wonder if he can even get that job."

Interspersed between her comments on community, Lamott gave students some advice on writing and inspiration. She talked about sitting down to write about inspiration and then coming up - after a long time - staring at the page with this list:

• Rage
• Debt
• Pressure - mental illness
• The desire for revenge

Not exactly what one might expect from a writer who is a Christian, but the list is classic Lamott. "I am totally unemployable - there's not a job I can hold," she observed. "I am tired all the time because I am an insomniac. I have no skill and I have a terrible attitude . . . there's nothing I can do. So I write." "If I can get into the kingdom," she added, "there is room for everyone."

She also wove in another theme that runs through her works - that of loss. Lamott's father died 25 years ago, a loss she still feels despite her success. "I feel like a gymnast who has performed a flawless routine to an empty auditorium," she said.

She advised the audience not to rush to get over their grief when they lose someone they love. "We are taught in this culture that a broken heart is to be gotten over as soon as possible," she said. "The culture lies. As Carly Simon said, 'there is more room in a broken heart.'"

And the best advice she had about writing, and about life, was to not be afraid to try and to fail. The most subversive thing you can do is to do the things you love, badly - to let yourself do badly, 'til you can to do them well," she said. "If you want to know how to play the piano when you are 65, you'd better start. You want to play piano because you want to play Mozart concertos and Chopin, not 'The Farmer in the Dell' - and what you especially do not want to do is to botch 'The Farmer in the Dell'... but if you want to play the piano, that's where you have got to start."

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