Hello noticers, observers, and chroniclers of everyday life!
Anne Lamott joins Write-minded this week to talk about so many things—what she writes about; how she kills her darlings; her process with her early readers and editors; and more. On the question of being compulsively readable, she shares with us some of the ideas from Bird by Birdthat have stood the test of time, why to cut your darlings, and how she thinks about those early first shitty drafts. Write-minded and Anne Lamott also invite you to join us the last weekend in October for a special writing retreat in Los Angeles. Visit WritersRising.com and enter code writeminded10 to get 10% off. And this week’s Substackin’ is drawn from Brooke’s Substack, Why You Maybe Should Write a Memoir.
A Writing Room Presents: Writers Rising — Oct. 25-27
We hope you also consider joining us the last weekend in October for a special writing retreat in Los Angeles—with Anne Lamott, Marlon James, and Cheryl Strayed, among others.
Visit WritersRising.com and enter code writeminded10 to get 10% off.
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: Welcome to another installment of Write-minded. I’m Brooke, here with Grant, as I am 99.99% of the time. Grant, we have a special guest today, Anne Lamott. And Anne is one of our celebrated local authors. She lives nearby in Marin—and is very recognizable with her style and her mini dreads, and often teaches at our local bookstore, Book Passage. I know both of us love Bird by Bird, which is Anne’s writing advice book. But I first came to know Anne from her memoir, Operating Instructions, which is about raising her son as a single mom, trying to stay sober, and lots of other observations about motherhood and community and faith and so much more. When I think about Anne Lamott I think about her honesty, her wit, her profound capacity to make connections that resonate with her readers. So this is what I want to home in on a bit today, Grant. How to apply what you know and what you’ve lived through to more universal experiences? So I have two questions for you: First, what’s your favorite Anne Lamott book and it’s totally fine if you say Bird by Bird, and second, how do you think about extracting universal messages from very singular experiences in your own writing?
Grant: I have to say that Bird by Bird is my favorite Anne Lamott book because it’s the only one I’ve read. I’ve heard her interviewed a lot, though, and once got to go to a private gathering where she spoke, so I feel like I’ve read more of her. And that’s because she has a singular voice, on the page and in real life. She’s sharp and edgy and smart and funny, and you never really know what she’s going to say, which is why I like her. As for your second question, I think that sums up my writing life at the moment. Everything from my Substack to my novel to my memoir is about exploring daily experiences and looking for something that has a higher universal meaning. I really do believe that you don’t have to travel far to find stories—we just have to notice them in our lives.
Brooke: Anne Lamott has been called the People’s Writer, in part because she has really figured out how to tap into her networks, notably on Facebook. She has a massive and dedicated following. I think she’s so beloved because she shares her struggles. She’s not afraid to be imperfect. And she’s such an optimist. She’s a columnist for the Washington Post these days, and I’m not sure if she exclusively writes about aging, but the ones that seem to get real traction are about aging. I love them. I mean, you read an Anne Lamott column and you are going to get something out of it.
Here’s just a sampling of the kind of things she writes in these columns:
To a great degree, in older age, ambition falls away. Such a relief. Appreciation and surprise bloom many mornings: Yay — I like it here.
I’m not loving the cognitive decline, which can be so scary at the time but (for me, in the early throes) still ends up being sort of funny.
I was thinking about what makes Anne Lamott so compulsively readable, and the thing that she does without fail is remember not to wallow, to stay upbeat even as she’s bemoaning things and poking fun at herself. She also has a real knack for drawing broad conclusions from her specific experiences. She seems to fundamentally understand or know in her bones how to write things that will be resonant for others. And I just want to contrast that, Grant, to a lot of stuff I see on Facebook and even on Substack that is not that. That is instead overly personal without the universal connection element, or the stuff that is filled with self-pity and grievance and the writer seems not to understand that people aren’t looking for that when they come online. I feel like this is harsh, but it’s part of the reason I’m so sick of Facebook is because I get on there and people are honestly complaining, and feeling sorry for themselves. On Substack, one of my least favorite kinds of posts are the ones where people are talking about people unfollowing them, or talking about their health ailments. And that’s not to say I don’t have compassion for people I care about because I do—but these are very public forums, and I sometimes wonder if people really understand their own audiences, or what it means to write for an audience. Anne Lamott—she does. She gets it. She is so locked in on what her readers want. And she’s a delight to read. Truly. Every Anne Lamott book or column, you know she’s gonna give you something—and that’s a truly generous thing.
Grant: Maybe that’s it: to make sure revelation is a generous act, not a self-serving act. I have to confess when you were talking about people complaining and feeling sorry for themselves on Facebook and Substack, I briefly asked myself if you were talking about me. And I say that because I’m trying to be more vulnerable and open with my writing, but my end goal isn’t navel gazing, but that I think we’re all generally too guarded or too perfect, and I want to explore my foibles and my less admirable sides. I like to think I’m being generous, or I try to be generous. I suppose it can be a thin line. So I’m curious, Brooke, besides generosity, what would you say are the ingredients of good compulsive writing that you just can’t get enough of. You’re a publisher, an acquiring editor. What are you looking for?
Brooke: I’m looking to be drawn in. As an avid reader, I’m looking not to have to work hard while I’m reading. I think that’s an under-discussed thing among editors. We read for a living, right—and so when I read something and I’m asking a hundred questions along the way, or I’m feeling like I have to slog through the writing, it doesn’t take that long for me to feel like this piece I’m reading doesn’t have the spark. The spark is different depending on the genre, okay—so that needs to be said. In fiction, it’s about hooking the reader and getting them invested in the story or the characters. In memoir, I think it’s a lot about authenticity. People don’t need literary writing and big complicated sentences and flowery language to get into a story. People also don’t need to feel like they’re taking care of you. Sometimes I read stuff, and this is more on social media, that is like a cry for attention or help—where a person seems to be asserting something that elicits a response from people like: Oh my gosh, are you okay? Or what’s even happening? That’s not tending to your readership. It’s interesting, Grant, because it’s just occurring to me that I’m a professional reader—and I think this is why I’m so obsessed with this idea of extracting meaning in and from your work. This is true of both fiction and nonfiction. I want to read to understand the world and my place in it. I want to be transported. And good writers know how to do that. They give you, the reader, something that’s for you, even if they’re telling stories about other people, or about themselves.
Grant: I know the posts you mention, where people are coy or seem to be saying something not to share something meaningful, but just get attention or tease attention. Strangely, our social media is a type of diary, so people use it in so many ways. I think there is a difference in writing vulnerably to open up a conversation and sort of seek meaning with your friends vs. writing vulnerably to get attention. I’m curious, Brooke, if this high bar that you have as a reader has played a role in your own writing. How do you hold all these ideas that we’re talking about today when you consider your own writing?
Brooke: For sure it does play a role. I’m a writer who sounds a lot on the page the way I do when I talk. That’s something I know to be true. I could almost transcribe my talking into my Substack posts. Because I write exclusively nonfiction, my own style is just that—authenticity and accessibility. But I pay attention to things like context. I’m super tuned into context, couching things in such a way that readers understand why I’m writing about something and what’s in it for them. In my Substacks, I’m writing to writers and authors, and a little bit to industry professionals. And that’s such a specific readership. But when I’ve been working on memoir, I have a different audience. Here, I’m definitely conscious of these universal messages and ideas and concepts. I’m not Anne Lamott and never will be, but I think where I feel resonant with her work is just in her willingness to share the mundane and everyday stories, and to find in those moments things that are funny, weird, ironic, meaningful. While we’re talking about writing, I’ll say that one of my pet peeves is when writers get precious. This happens when writers make meaning from their experiences, but in such a way that implies they’re special, or unique, or singularly interesting. The reason I and other people love Anne Lamott is because she’s so not that. She’s a very normal person with everyday concerns and foibles who is grounded and shares things that are embarrassing and doesn’t try to make herself special. I don’t know if this is something you can necessarily practice. But I do think writers can learn to see (or hear from others) where they are overwriting, or being precious, or trying too hard. But you have to be willing to seek out honest feedback, and then take that to heart. Grant, before we end, what was the hardest piece of writing feedback you ever got and did it change your writing? Coming out of an MFA, this may be a loaded question.
Grant: Haha, sometimes the hardest writing feedback isn’t the most helpful. I had an esteemed writer who I stayed an extra semester to take a class with write “No shit” in the margins of a story of mine. Not helpful. And it didn’t change my writing. I don’t know if anyone’s feedback has truly changed my writing, actually. I think the thing with feedback is to know when you’re being receptive and to be sensitive to the moments you’re resistant or defensive. This just comes with a lot of practice. I remember one moment with an editor who marked a passage of mine as being overwritten, and I got defensive and didn’t accept his change, and after the book came out, I realized that he was right. I wanted to change it, but I couldn’t. So I am conscious of overwriting things as a result now. And now this discussion has made me wonder about how I’m sharing my own revelatory writing.
Brooke: Oh gosh—don’t let that be true. Sorry if I had a little bone to pick today. I think the question writers of personal narrative have to ask themselves is the degree to which they’re positioning their own experiences as rare or uniquely important or different—and to always find points of connection. That’s really the key. So let’s hear from the master herself, Anne Lamott, on this topic, on her writing, her latest book, and other things she’s up to, including a writing retreat in late October that we’re going to, and that we hope some of you will consider coming to. We’ll get into that and more—after this little skip-dee-doo of a break. Hang on and we’ll be right back.
This week’s Substackin’:
This week’s Substackin’ focuses on writing a memoir, and why maybe you should. The post I'm highlighting was one of the first I wrote on Substack that legitimately got a lot of attention. It struck a nerve, and got a lot of comments because of that. It was basically a rebuttal to a very stupid article that came out in The Atlantic that was disparaging to memoir and to memoirists, and so I came out in defense of the genre, as I’m wont to do.
Substackin’ this week ties this piece into our conversation with Annie Lamott, and makes the case (of course) for why you should *maybe* write a memoir.
Read Brooke’s full Substack post linked here.
ABOUT ANNE LAMOTT
Anne Lamott is the author of the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers Hallelujah Anyway, Help, Thanks, Wow, Small Victories, Stitches, Some Assembly Required, Grace (Eventually), Plan B, Traveling Mercies, Bird by Bird, and Operating Instructions. She is also the author of seven novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. Her latest book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love, was published in April 2024. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.