Anne Lamott with Sam Lamott: Some Assembly Required

hi everyone thank you so much for coming I love this hall I'm so honored to be here and it's our last night on tour tomorrow I go to one more place in Oakland but Sam has been absolved of his responsibility we've been together a lot it's been great we went to the East Coast and did five or six cities there and and then I was on the on the Midwest and then we've been doing them again here so were were and the miracles were still speaking and we just keep looking at each other going we're still speaking we're still speaking so anyway oh I'm just all of a sudden my eyes are adjusting I can see friends that are here my brother or my sister-in-law and so I think we'll do what we've been doing which is to say we'll just read a little bit from I'll tell you a little bit about the book and and then we'll eat just read a couple pieces and I think really people love questions and answers so we'll leave as much time as possible for that and Jack's is here somewhere and may or may not make an appearance he's having young love he's got this fabulous babysitter and he's so uninterested in either of us at this point but you know we can't compete she had little cars and we didn't have little cars and and we're not adorable young women so I'm pretty I'm what I'm ought turned 58 yesterday so it's kind of amazing and I was realizing that when I first started doing the book passage University where Dominican was involved it was summer or fall of 1985 because I remember I was still drinking isn't that funny and we had a great season and and then in 1986 I got sober but we used to just take over this campus and with about 25 people about 23 of whom were also drinking so that made it more fun and so anyway let me just tell you really briefly about this book it's called some assembly required its sequel to operating instructions Sam wrote a preface where he talks about how my editor had asked me if I wanted to if I would ever do a sequel and I'd said to operating instructions I said no I thought it would be exploitive and he said it wouldn't be if we didn't exploit anyone and that was so interesting to think about and then I mentioned it to Sam because I was I didn't want I was actually working on something and I didn't particularly want to do it and some I mean operating instructions was just so contained it was just what it was it was one little book that we wrote for I wrote for Sam you know 20 years ago and Sam was really into it because the book had meant so much to him growing up because it's so so written from my heart to his and it's so written with the the intention of preserving these moments and memories and the frustration all the others read you will pay a couple lines from his preface Jack's when you read this one day I want you to know the love laughter and incredible messes of the most memorable astonishing an incredible year of your mother's life in mind so far I can't wait for you to be able to understand what quirky loving loyal characters make up your family and friends how much we adore you and how much we mean to each other it's an honor and a pleasure to be your son I don't know how I got so blessed to get you as my son and I wanted you to have a book like operating instructions it's all your own so it's exact same format as the other book it starts in pregnancy and it ends on the first birthday of our darling Jack's and it's it's kind of kitchen sink in the best possible way I wanted to do something that had never been done before I wanted a format that didn't exist but that worked and people always ask me if I'm talking about writing what can you use how you know how can you do this or that or can you do this the answer is you can really get a you can do anything you can get away with if you can keep people feeling that it's fresh and true to the material then you can do any whole thing so we did any other thing we did a lot Sam did a lot a lot of work by email he wrote several set pieces one about Father's Day that's my favorite thing but that he's completely turned on but we this is something like our my 16th event in 22 days so I will never turn on the Father's Day PC my younger brother's my closest adult I mean along with Sam but you know older person old guy and and he got married to my very precious sister-in-law net and I asked Sam to write a piece about that and to be kind of the reporter for the wedding I was the efficient and efficient Sam was the best man and my favorite line is right before our there's so many favorite lines but they're all Sam's one is I have this dress that I wear for weddings like I think I've done like two but this would be the second and it's so outrageous I bought it at the great wardrobe exchange the consignment store on San Anselmo Avenue and it's from the 50s I think and it's kind it's got this great neckline and it's got this will make you laugh it's got the zippers on the side so you can't gain any weight because it not only will trap the your fat but it'll trap the back fat so you have to and then it always shrinks in the closet just from year to year because dresses do shrink if they are trapped in stale air so but the miracle was I could get the dress on for the wedding and so it's kind of nagging people said how did you get the work out of Sam why tonight you know being bribes and threats money change hand what worked at 14 worked at 19 and so I snagging him over the phone one day and I said how was that piece coming on your uncle's wedding and he said it's coming along and I said what have you mentioned how cute and thin I looked in my it's got sequins you know I mean it's very 50s it's just fabulous and I said did you mention how thin and cute I looked in my Heather Eros dress with sequins and there was one of those pauses that if you've ever had a teenager you know that it's not a good situation and he said mom will it hurt you very much if you're not the main thing about the article about steve-o's wedding so I thought that was so funny so yeah it's all about me so I'll just read you the piece called in the beginning that will introduce us and then Sam will just maybe do two pieces each and then take some questions so in the beginning my very young son Sam became a father in mid July 2009 when his girlfriend Amy Tobias gave birth to their son they named him jacks Jesse Lamont Jesse after Amy's beloved grandmother Jessie and Jax because they liked the way it sounded Amy was 20 when she delivered and Sam was 19 they're both a little young but who asked me Sam's birth on August 29th 1989 was by far the most important day of my life and Jax's was the second Sam and I are quite close and I'd always look forward with enthusiasm to becoming a grandmother someday and say 10 years or so perhaps after he had graduated from the Art Academy he attends in San Francisco and settled down into a career and when I was old enough to be a grandmother I was a young 55 maybe a medium 55 let's say a ripe 55 with a child just one year past his majority the day before Thanksgiving 2008 I had heard that amy was expecting when I got a call from Sam in despair mom I'm going to be a father he said I was silent for a time Oh Sam I said finally he and I said it differently than that I said I said Oh Sam he and Amy had been together tumultuously since his birthday a year earlier but they had split up a couple of months before although not I can see now in the biblical sense amy is beautiful tiny and Hispanic with her roots in Chicago and her parents now living in North Carolina she had arrived in our lives on the morning of Sam's 18th birthday to attend cosmetology school in San Francisco they had become friends at a camp on the east coast stayed in touch by phone and text and begun a long-term relationship which I hadn't heard about one day Sam told me he'd offered her his living room couch until she found an apartment right I said when he told me this plan I was not born yesterday God mom he had said like get your head out of the gutter she had moved off the couch by lunch the first day they arrived for Sam's family party at my house at 4:00 that afternoon very much in love my brother Stevo his sunny six year old daughter Clara and his fiancee Annette were there as was our beloved uncle Miller our aunt Eleanor our best family friends including Gertrude a 90 year old German who had always served as Sam's paternal grandmother and a scattering of cousins we were all transfixed by this beautiful girl who bounced into the house in tiny shorts that would fit my cat she is around four foot nine and weighed 90 pounds at the time with long black hair huge brown eyes and a perfect smile and my first thought was whom did I invite who has a teenage Hispanic daughter I thought she might be related to a net who is also latina then Sam stepped inside smiling sheepishly and introduced Amy to me a little over a year later Amy had terrible morning sickness that lasted a few months and she spent a lot of time taking naps on my couch and nibbling bird sized snacks I was happy all the time at the thought of Sam's being a father am I getting to be a grandmother except when I was sick with fears about their future or enraged that they had gotten themselves pregnant so young or in a swivel of trying to control their every move not to mention every aspect of their future they moved into a one-room apartment a few blocks from the old studio and created a nursery in a corner of the bedroom Sam was woozy with pride and scared to death amy was clear calm and fiercely into becoming a mother she did things the way she wanted to which made me I mean even when it made me unhappy sometimes I cried Sam tried to protect a me from my neediness and anxieties ie they purposely didn't call or text me for days and they fought routinely Amy would threaten to move back to Chicago which made me crazier than anything but I would not interfere and Sam would call and despair and I would stay neutral with undertones of suppressed rage and they'd come through their conflict and I would get to be the beloved tribal elder for having stayed neutral and here's my son Samuel Mudd hi everybody thanks for coming I don't know who dragged you here but it's not too late to get a late night movie this is an email for me on August 3rd hi mom here's the skinny on the fam Jax's fingernails have gotten long again we clipped them just last week this is already one of our least favorite things to do since last night he's managed to scratch his face a couple of times badly a new development is that now when we pick him up even if he is swaddled he flails his arms in the air instead of lying passively in baby burrito mode his hands now open and close and because he's armed with claws he scratches everything including us between feedings last night he was trying to stay awake with us which was thrown off our schedule because he needs to sleep we need to rest and then he needs to eat again often every three hours it's like a perpetual motion machine we loved it at the time last night because it was so cute to just look at him now however we were all wasted this is an email in August 4th Amy is exhausted from Jax being fussy all night because of the frustrating sleeping eating situation I took Jackson let her sleep in but she isn't pumping her breast milk so I can't feed him this makes me sad and mad not to sound too much like dr. Seuss I started thinking about how much I really hate the umbilical cord stump and I wish I could pick it off I'm fantasizing about how much easier life would be without it bathing being able to throw on diapers without worrying about it this damn stump has been nothing but a nightmare for someone who worries and likes to control things because it has been spotty bloody and not at all cooperating with what I'd like to see there which is a nice plain tummy but as I was writing this just now Jax began to fuss and I walked over to pick him up and as I did this black thing rolls off of him I quickly realized it's a stump I should be like hooray right nope as I was going over to show off the new stomach situation Amy who's been peacefully sleeping I looked down at where the stump was and I'm now convinced I could see his insides I don't think it healed right and I'm looking at what must be his large intestine I woke gave me up in a panic yelling at her to call the paramedics Jax needs surgery Amy looks at what I'm seeing and is very concerned but somehow keeps her cool and calls the pediatrician during the phone call I find blood on his fingernails I've caught him red-handed he has clot open his stomach plus it's all her fault because we didn't clip his nails Amy called the pediatricians office and nobody seemed to be concerned that my baby's guts were coming out of his stomach I mean the person on the phone and then the advice nurse who listened to our concerns there was no emotional change on their part are these people desensitized when I'm convinced my child is dying the medical the medical professionals trying to sound calm actually have the opposite effect for me so on the phone I feel that this is a dire emergency and my baby probably needs emergency surgery so these receptionist's and nurses should be very attentive and concerned instead they gently convince us that we didn't even need to come in that Jack's was perfectly fine the small open wound turned out to just be a normal old gooey bellybutton they see it every day we covered it up with a spongebob squarepants band-aid all as well ish this is there's a lot of pieces about my little church that I've written about so much over the years st. Andrew Presbyterian Marin City you're all welcome 11 o'clock Sunday nice and late so you can eat a lot first and and have the Church of the New York Times and then still make it to church you're always welcome we have lots of Sunday school with well we have me we have two Sunday School teachers in a nursery for Jax and his colleagues so it's a very sweet and inclusive place you would be welcome but so there's probably eight pieces about my church because it's just my favorite day and hours of the week I just live for to get back there again so I eventually got sober there I converted there I got sober in 86 and I think I got baptized the next year there Sam was baptized as an infant in 1989 and we hope to have Jack's baptized there someday but he hasn't been yet but you know I have a mentor I call horrible Bonnie and she was very clear that we are baptized with our first breath here and we are baptized and chosen and beloved and claimed and that the sacrament is is sort of a afterthought so that actually hasn't triggered me as much as you might think it would to have not had him baptized as an infant so but anyway he and I go to church every Sunday together this is from October 4th I went to church crankily because of his stewardship month and I hate the shakedown sermons but I had to go because I was teaching Sunday school and Amy and Jack's have been away for almost three weeks and it had been to visit her parents up on the East Coast and everyone that she's close to lives in Chicago and had been really painful and we just kind of he lives in the city and I live in Fairfax and we kind of gritted our teeth and gotten the time to pass so is it really true that everyone including me is growing and healing spiritually whether we experience that or not it sure doesn't feel that way Bonnie and Tom both think so their mentors although they point out that growth is not fast clean cute or comfortable it would be great if God were up there shoving ever resistant people like me through the maze towards presence and serenity but no it's freewill 101 this does not work for me at all still I went to church bit early because of the Sunday school kids only there were no kids except in the nursery so I hung out with Jax's colleagues Isaiah and Cooper and their teacher until Jax's absence began to feel like a cavern I came I pined I headed back to church for the dreaded stewardship sermon and everyone there conspired to ruin my best efforts to wallow in self-pity the four oldest women with their Walker's wheelchairs and wigs in the Amen Corner snagged me first Billie Johnson's hair looked especially pretty and when I commented on this she said oh I just found this old one in the hamper she made me hug and kiss her for so long that I remembered Sam at age five unable to part with me one night heartbroken that I was going out he said like a sad little old man let me keep kissing you until I can stop crying the gentle tough crying laughing singing congregation is such an unfair advantage on Jax's part it really sucks I mean I ought such an unfair advantage on God's part I just thought about Jax for a second and I read it sorry Sam loves it when I screw up Hino he notes it because he thinks I make this look easy so every single time I stutter or it was such an unfair advantage on God's part it really sucks then Rijn Ola sang the lead in the choir anthem and her voice was as peaceful as the pristine silence of the ashram it's just the other side of it there's a lot of stories about this ashram we were visiting down at hills of Los Altos - there was like 12 people and just crystalline silence it's just the other side of that pristine silence it's what carves out space so we can rest in - what's bigger than us her voice the choir the quietness at the ashram are paradoxically like burrowing into the snow to make a shelter that covers and surrounds tiny you and keeps you warm i guarded myself against Veronica and her stewardship sermon and then she preached one of her best sermons ever she began by talking about the German word for sin which he said means to separate to sunder so that instead of seeing our divine nature we see our separation everywhere from one another from God from our own souls it reminded me of a lion I've had taped to my wall for years we aren't a drop in the ocean but are the ocean and drops Veronica said that no matter how painful and wrong things seem Jesus is always playing the music softly in our lives and we can dance around because when we dance with one another everyone feels happier and chosen and we are dancing with the godhead of which we are apart then she made us get up and dance around I am NOT making this up all 40 of us danced Evelyn in her wheelchair Mars Cortez with her cane a sleeping baby was danced in his mother's arms and the rest of us held hands or hips in a conga line or did the foxtrot or like me the Bolinas hippie tribal stomp I danced with his oxygen tank I went home and danced around as I cleaned the house - happy to contain myself because on top of it all coincidentally haha almost three weeks had miraculously passed somehow and Sam would be home God and Jax would be home tomorrow so I really do love when my mom messes up I bathe in it and tonight she actually preemptively stole my line about how I love messing her where I love her messing up but that's okay we're having technical difficulties okay no I got it thank thanks all right February twenty-ninth interview with me Sam tell me what he is like now even at 7 months old he's a totally roaring rocking kicking Godzilla child he's like part of the World Series crowd that's gone wild he's gotten such focus and will and then me and Amy have these clashes of will so it's like we're two alpha male gorillas trying to raise Godzilla what really has changed in the last few months that the buck really stops here with me the problem has to stop at this chain of command I'm not going to turn over my problems to you to my mother and say I just can't take it anymore now I ought to now I automatically feel let's just get it done before I could perfectly imagine an elaborate drawing or plan and install forever on creating it now I know I need not put off put it off with a horrible diaper before I might wait for Amy to discover it and deal with it which was now like I said the buck stops here just do it boy we've come a long way from those first black tar poops now they're pretty human kind of manly now because he's so grown up and can do so many things and engage with us I think why am i wiping some other guy's ass what's wrong with this picture before he was so helpless so helpless but I but no more I tell him I am NOT going to be doing this for much longer today he was on my lap being happy and playful with me for a long time and then he wanted to crawl off and do his own thing I let him go Wow now he wants to go go somewhere before there is no somewhere else now he might want to go to his bouncy saucer and he totally wants to with conviction like when he's one of the dogs want that wants to go out he doesn't give up or forget about it it's like he's going hey dude what does it take for a guy to get put in his bouncy saucer around here so I whip I think there's a couple of people with mics if you have any questions we're really happy to answer them about anything writing faith or real life or really anything at all the everybody for for 20 plus years the first question has always been how is Sam doing so now it's sort of throwing everything off because everyone can see how he's doing so sometimes the first question is sort of hard to think of yeah first thank you both I by operating instructions in bulk my husband says I come up to the book store checkout and they're like oh god here she comes so 30-some women are all over the world they're crying over baby Sam um I'm also a writer and I sort of wanted to touch on what you said in the beginning about not exploiting people and I think a lot actually when I write about your work over the years and and how you have always sort of been able to write about Sam in a way that I always felt was seemed very respectful and it was always very clear that you were checking in with him when he was old enough about what you could share and what you couldn't share and so my question is really for both of you and partially for say em and how you guys have negotiated that over the years to find a way that you can share enough that it's truthful without sharing so much that you're sharing parts that are not your story but our in fact Sam's story and sort of how you've managed growing up that way mm-hmm okay Wester well I did have much choice when I was really little but my mom kind of told me that was normal like oh all kids grow up on the floors of bookstores you know that's just part of growing up but um from about the time I was 10 she always ran it by me and a lot of the times I didn't like the first draft and I thought why you really make me look bad and you look like an angel and so she'd take it back to the drawing board and come up with it and then it'd be like okay this kind of both makes us look like human and yeah I mean for nonfiction it's hard because you really have to keep some things close to the chest it's like you know stuff you really have to protect your family from but um it's a novel my mom's got great great advice for that yeah I've always told students when I had them that anything had happened to you is really yours you really get to use anything at all that happened and if people wish you were going to write a more admiring portrait of them they should have behaved better so but I have never ever wanted to hurt anyone's feelings ever I've never wanted to expose the family laundry I you know I I so have the goods on all my cousins and every single person that's close to me knows this that I don't write about the intimate stuff I write sort of one or two or three it's probably two or three concentric circles out from where my life is really happening and the intimacy of being a mother being a sister being an aunt and a niece so that's always gone without saying that I was never going to write anything that Sam would not be glad I'd written later when he was looking at it we both felt that very strongly with this book that you know it's not a pure journal it's not everything that happened it's a book that we really wanted to be able to give as a gift to Jack's so that it was going to be these same sorts of true moments but but with really with an eye to everybody being a to feel okay about it so both of us showed Amy everything I had her permission before we started we showed her family everything and I just first of all sometimes people Sam says all the time you just got that so wrong or else he'd say he'll say you know you just make up this stuff and now and then you try to convince everyone that it's true which I do like for instance this is just a kind of dumb example but I've always been convinced that everybody loves my cranberry spritzers because I happen to love cranberry spritzers and it's my main drink for 25 years is Calistoga with a couple inches of cranberry juice in it in either a slice of lemon or lime so it's really pretty has that blush in it and then it either a bright piece of yellow or green and so we were having a holiday one day and Sam said something like oh god not the cranberry spritzer as I said everybody loves my cranberry spritzers and he said they really don't it's just usually all you have and and I said and then I have a little niece I'm very close to who's nine now I said well Clara loves my cranberries fritters and she said I hate them so but I do make up this stuff like I'll say to people Oh Sam loves history he just loves anything happy to do this history and soon be going wait what you know but I believe it like even standing here I believe that this is true but I just made it up so that with a novel you get to use everything everything everything but you have to disguise it if it's going to be something that is going to put anybody in a bad light I mean you first of all you just not are not here to expose people unless you're a journalist and you're here to tell your stories and you're asking people you're saying do you have a minute you want to come sit by the campfire about the story I think you might find interesting and you don't want to be sued is the main thing so but my experience I've written seven or eight novels is that if you just change pupils physical characteristics slightly they have never once ever recognized themselves ever you can change the color of someone's hair and their height and because people like me making up all this stuff people have such a honed version of themselves that they can live with so people basically think they're sort of positive and hard-working and on top of their games and stuff so I had a friend that this is 25 years ago when I wrote Joe Jones every single thing out of her mouth was negative it was just so strange because she actually had this kind of bubbly Ness about her being but everything came out like this ugly word association game so you would talk about seagulls and she would move to like avian fecal matter like that but she'd have a fact a factoid or you'd say something about how beautiful the sunlight was and she would think she started talking about melanoma and so I made up a character in Joe Jones named Fay the world's most negative human being because it was all sort of fun and sometimes I'd kind of have these little games inside myself I'd toss or a question I think how can you make that ugly you know and she never once disappointed me ever and but I was fond of her she felt like God had sort of assigned me to her signed her to me and vice versa and then when Joe Joe John Jones came out I was very worried and we were walking along and she said I really really enjoyed it I just and I thought all the minor characters were really interesting so thank you she said you know Fay and I my heart stomped on and she said I know someone just like her and that is over and over and over the truth so if you have stories you want to tell from childhood or your marriage or whatever just change the hair color I always side with men just change the size of their manhood because if it's very they're not going to come forward and go that man with the tiny little that's me that you no one ever ever ever is going to do it ever so if you change it the person into somebody who they don't want to claim to be you're home free so an otherwise I've always told my students write what you'd love to come upon because that tells you that something in your soul you know you know that feeling of reading something just feeling grateful just going oh god I loved I'm in and and that's what is a very good signal to yourself that you're writing something of real depth and that you can really feel confident maybe something universal even though you're going to have the only details that you can tell so there's a question in the back here comes the mic now I have one well they're getting the mic - my name is Debra and I'm so delighted to get to hear you again I heard you first just after operating instructions came out of it in Seattle and I had an intake of breath when Sam came on stage tonight Oh to see this real grown person and with all the images I had of him through the years and what a handsome capable person he is so congratulations on that I have two children my own they're 25 and 27 and I guess your comments about how you interact and my children will hold up their hands one two three four how many times they've heard the story oh I'm telling about that Oh so so as you're telling these stories collectively now for your grandson and son are there ones that you particularly want him to remember Oh see there's our person sorry Jax hi hon hi sweetie pie um that's the new fiance Sam do you want to answer that I have told I mean Saint you know it's like being it's it's like having a husband or a wife in that one way that they just have to try not to roll their eyes so that the other guests can see it but you know I have a pretty limited number of stories and Sam has a limited number stories and um oh I just have the perspective of this one slightly eccentric very left-wing sort of aging hippie wavy gravy admirer and I see things through a certain focus I've always sought God I have always understood that something heard me when I prayed and since I was a little kid and I was shamed into not believing that because my parents were atheists but I've always had this kind of other reality that I could go to where it was bigger in Trippier and a lot more based in love and the fact that we're loved and chosen I'm I think my parents forgot to mention that I think I meant to say you're perfect the way you are but it just slipped their mind and so I spent my entire life until I was in my early 30s thinking as soon as I do this or if I could only learn to do this if I could only find the right guy if I could only find this if I could only get this to happen for me as a writer and so the big story for me spen when I started to realize a it wasn't out there and it wasn't out there for anybody and if people looked great in that a great marriage and they had everything perfect and the perfect Subaru and the perfect everything that I was comparing my outsides to I was comparing my rattled very human anxious inside to their outsides that was burnished and arranged you know and tricked out by a cute area rug from Ikea and little by little after I got sober I started to understand that all interesting stories were me two stories that all the stories I want to read I'm going you know what that's so strange me too no one's ever said it before I love that it makes me laugh and in the stories I tell Normie two stories and I think that's why people have responded to my books about being a mother and a writer in anti-christian because what I decided to do was to write what I would have loved to come upon which is to say publication will make you way more mentally ill than you already are you know it's not the incentive the incentive is the writing the incentive is to become a wonderful artist with a dedication and a discipline because that's the path of freedom and I chose to become a mother who would say this stuff out loud that it turned out every mother has thought and it just hadn't been done yet and so I would say when Sam was 2 months old and colicky I'm thinking about bundling him up and leaving him outside just for one night because I feel that if I could get one night sleep I could handle this and every Noah nobody went you wider that's so crazy what you know that's so angry and every single mother went oh yeah me too so I forgot the question but do you have anything when it comes to my mom telling stories I'm so good at not paying attention or listening and I'm really in my head most of the time even throughout the day and all my friends think of a terrible hearing and I went and got checked and it's fine so I'm just really good at tuning people out and we've had to do this before but it looks like we have to do it again my mom will start at a on a question and just end at Z so if we could get a Timecop for like five minutes to do a timer then we'll get out of here a lot earlier well he's also worried that I don't make sense because what because I think in terms of tangents and that's what I love and those are the singers and the writers I love and the poets I love who start with one thing you know start with some leaves in the garden and kind of trip out and go really far into where we go when we are and and that's how I think and I was a spaced out child my oldest friend Shelly Adams from when I was six and her father who practically raised me dick and Lee Adams I was this way at six you can talk to them afterwards I was spaced out and I was absent-minded and I maybe was long-winded and I had all these tangents going but that's what storytellers do Sam you have four or five balls in the air and are three or four of those I know I'm being nudged off now but you have some plates in the air and that's what a good novelist is doing is keeping the plates in the air so let's move on to another question I think there was one back there yeah I first of all Jack's over there I can't wait to read your book ha ha ha and thank you Annie and Sam and Jax and I don't know the Allie Allison Allison thank you all for being here fiance um I wanted to know if you collaborated on the title of this book and what what inspired you to call it some assembly required Sam just looked at me said how did we get the title the interesting thing is I've almost never thought of a title isn't that funny I've always had a working title and one title I did think of as all new people from the line where the husband's kind of annoyed with the mother for always being so worried and he says honey you know what's the big deal 100 years all-new beeble and and I thought of traveling mercies which is some one of the prayers the older people at our church always say D if you go any mailing Mercy's enemies go with God and and and and be God to anyone whose need needful and and just let your mind be blown and and come home safe and sound which is like a very great path for life so but with this one someone thought operating instructions which I didn't think was a great title bird by bird the copy you know the copy editors there's a person in the chain of command who so keeps you from looking like a fool and this is my 13th book and the copy editors are the reason I can look at myself in the mirror because they say well you know it's funny because uncle Al's eyes are brown on page 27 in there glistening blue on page 100 when he's crying and then also all the way through there this can't happen this was not a Sunday and I think of course it's a Sunday I wrote it down but you know what I was a spaced out child in menopause 10 years ago was not helpful to the focus and the concentration and so I just was it oh and I make up stuff so always I'm sure it was Sunday it really wasn't this takes place in a specific year and the copy editor is paid to go find out that the Sunday would actually be the 8th not to 13th or the whatever so somebody buy my editor sent a whole bunch of title ideas and at first I think he sent some assembly and then I wrote that and we cross our letter Krauss I wrote wouldn't it be funny or to say some assembly required and he had written back and say it should be some assembly required and as soon as I heard it I called Sam I just know new you know sometimes you just know something you go that's exactly the only title it could have ever been you know there's a great old Christian line that the soul rejoices in hearing what it already knows and it's one of my favorite lines because when you read a line of poetry or you hear a line of music or even a phrase that your soul longs to have expressed in this world where most important stuff can't even be expressed oh oh he's looking at his thought it's such a relief and when I heard some assembly I just knew I just went that's a title and when I called Sam he knew and we both so that's how it happens with she's probably making up the part about adding required yeah no I'm not I'm not making up that part but but thank you for sharing so um one or two more questions if there are one or two more questions yes in the front well you can just say it no repeat it my process for writing is just not to write to get published it's just sort of like Journal and write and just keep things that you want to keep for your own life and I've always had a good writing voice and my punctuation always was terrible and so then teachers either because they were scared to give me a bad English grade or something they always really liked my writing voice and they just got over the fact that my punctuation sucked yeah yeah you could all his writing was always beautiful and the punctuation sucked and it turned out that you can't just try to drill it into people everything you try to get your children to do by force is something they need to resist so but now we're both on Twitter he's capital Sam capital Lamont because there's somebody out there maybe she's here tonight named Samantha Lamont who took the lowercase Sam Lamont so he's uppercase and I'm Anne Lamott but I don't think I'm any case in my any case no I don't think so but so he'll show me this stuff he writes sometimes it'll be brilliant in the punctuation sucks and and also we think it would be good or if you put a comma there because a comma serves a purpose you stop for a second right you're done and then enough and then you go on to the rest of the sentence and so I can still feel him just going oh my god when will this end dear Lord but that's just the way it is you know we're we're like you we're imperfect and some days are just too long and as my friend Tom says and and sometimes we get mad at each other and I will invade his space or I'll be convinced that my ideas are really once again excellent ideas and that if he and in fact most of the world including the subcontinent of India would listen to my ideas we could organize and things would go better for everyone but I have 58 years now of knowing that that's not that any effort to control and manage will result in a lack of harmony but I still trying I'll just say one last thing I maybe this would be a good thing to end on it's a very eccentric book I think you'd have to admit if you read it it's there's a long passage on my trip to India which just blew me away like nothing ever did but one that once I once again I learned that for some of us who were blackbelt codependents and girls raised in the 50s to be perfect girls which I was I was the goodest Goodis girl ever really I know some of you think you were but I I mean I was mixing drinks for my family at about 6:00 you know I could make blender drinks and I had a little you know I had a little caseload my parents weren't doing very well and I tried to work with them and but I just believed that if you listened to my ideas it will help you and the main theme I would say of this book is someone trying to stomp controlling other people including her son her daughter-in-law and infant good luck but I have learned through the grace of having other women like me grandmothers that I'm really responsible for what's inside of my own hula-hoop but when you're a parent even in an aunt and an uncle you just keep your fingers kind of tremble with the joy of going into someone's life and picking up you know cleaning up organizing I went to India and I thought look we have got to get organized here this this this is a mess you know and but I didn't have a clipboard or any post-its and and these other women through grace have taught me to kind of grip myself by the wrist and do and breathe and and say my little calming prayer which is about trying to help me let go and not leave such deep claw marks and and it's one day at a time and as I said some days go better than others so a lot of the gives me trying to learn that Sam is on his own hero's journey and it was nineteen when he and Amy had Jackson and Amy was on her hers and what you want to do as a parent is to get on their path with them because of your good ideas and this tiny addiction around trying to control other people tiny and hardly worth mentioning and I want to run alongside him on his hero's journey with my clipboard in my post-its and the book is about how one day at a time we release people to the care of their higher power we try not to stand between them and their higher power the only source of healing and discernment and true connection and how we try to surrender into the care of our own one day at a time and in community and so thank you this has really just been such an honor to be with you here tonight and we just loved it and love you so thank you that's done

Channel: Dominican University of California

Views: 39,497

Rating: 4.664516 out of 5

Keywords: Leadership, Dominican, University, Institute, Lecture, authors, Anne, Lamott, Marin, College, Book

Id: XYrIG-lchrY

Length: 53min 49sec (3229 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 14 2012