Poured Over: Anne Lamott on Somehow

By Jenna Seery / April 9, 2024 at 6:00 am

Somehow: Thoughts on Love by Anne Lamott is full of empathy, heart and humanity, drawing on personal struggles and triumphs to showcase the wider truths of love and compassion. Lamott joined us to talk about the powers of connection, the impact of distractions in our lives, joy and wonder in creativity and more with guest host, Jenna Seery.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.                   

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.         

Featured Books (Episode):
Somehow: Thoughts on Love by Anne Lamott
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
The Dry by Jane Harper
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin
On Writing by Stephen King

Full Episode Transcript

Jenna Seery

I’m Jenna Seery, a bookseller and the associate producer of Poured Over and today I am very excited to be joined by Anne Lamott. This is her 20th book. And that is no small number. There is some really wonderful fiction there is Bird by Bird, Operating Instructions, Help Thanks Wow, personal favorite of mine, and Dusk, Night, Dawn. And now today, I am so excited to get to talk about Somehow: Thoughts on Love. This is a pretty big topic to, you know, take on love in its entirety. But you managed to do it in a way that I think is really something pretty special. So thank you so much for being here.

Anne Lamott

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, yeah, I can tell you why I took it on which it does seem kind of kind of a bit much. But I wanted to write in one place, in a book, everything I know that is true. That has seen me and my family through really tough times. And things that have always worked, and they will almost certainly work again, no matter what my son and grandson’s future holds. And I wanted to leave behind some operating instructions for when I’m gone. That community is a source of incredible strength and connection. And that nature is usually where we can find a reset button. If we start off terrified or cranky or bummed whatever that we get outside, we look up at the sky. So I wanted it all to be in one place. And everything that has ever worked before turned out to have something to do with love.

I think that’s really important. And you can feel that in this book, you start by talking about something that clicked for me. So instantly, this idea of taking a walk and just getting outside and that you can you know, see so much beauty and, and connect so well in just a quick 10 minute walk. And I love that because that’s one of my go tos. And I’m glad to see other people do that as well.

Yeah, well, my husband who’s a writer says that everything that is true and beautiful about life can be seen and experienced on a 10-minute walk. You know, the majesty of nature and the minutiae of nature and the miracles, the green sprouts breaking through the cement, and the neighbors and the neighbor’s dog who survived getting run over who has three legs now in it. So always happy to see me and the neighbors who are on their last legs, who are also always everything about being here can be experienced on an intentional 10-minute walk.

Especially now with how fast the world is, how hard it is, how heavy it can be. Somehow your book holds us for a minute, it supports us, it gives us a space to say what is love, where I think a lot of books that have approached love. There’s really flowery stuff. And then there’s really clinical psychological stuff. But there’s a middle ground with love that fits with the way we live life a little bit more closely.

I don’t go in for the flowery, and I’m a dropout. So I don’t do the intellectual or technological. But, you know, I asked this little boy, one of my Sunday School students, who said what is love? And he thought for a moment and he said, Oh, you know, it’s just stuff. And so I started off the book with that. It’s just, but what is this stuff? Let’s unpack that a little. It’s, obviously it’s an energy. It’s a feeling in our hearts. Maybe it’s something it’s something in the atmosphere that that surrounds us, maybe it’s what we’re made of maybe, you know, Einstein said there’s exactly one thing and it’s just all moving at different speeds. So a six year old boy is made of it, a mountain or a glacier is made of the same thing. And maybe it has something to do with love energy. But anyway, it takes it takes some commitment to seeing it, sharing it doing the deep dive into my own life and history to sort of tell you all that I think love is.

There’s so much of your own life and this and people that have read your work over the years and have seen you grow and change and to see your son and your grandson, the life that you’ve built. There’s so much of that in this book. There’s a real sense of accomplishment of working together a lot of pieces that will seem familiar from the past some of those topics you’ve touched on before, but like you said leaving something behind mind with this, it really feels like it’s a culmination of sorts.

Thank you. That’s what I hoped for it to be. I hope to leave, as I said, operating instructions for my son and grandson for when I’m gone, no matter what the future holds. And we know from the UN papers on climate change several years ago, they said we had 12 years to turn things around and not positive that we have, or have even begun to. And so I know but I know certain things will work and serve them and even heal them when they’re in fear or confusion or just stunned. I know certain things, a 10 minute walk finding, finding your community picking up the 200 pound phone, becoming a person for others, you know, getting out of your own self where you just feel a lot of trouble and frantic worries and and being love for somebody else who maybe can’t get out. And, you know, the basis is that if you want to have loving feelings, which is what I think heaven is you take loving actions, you fill a couple of bags with canned foods and Oreos, and you take them over to the homeless shelter in the areas of your county that aren’t doing so well. You call your most annoying relative and you stay on the phone with them. You don’t argue you don’t correct you listen, and you say, Huh, every so often, or that’s an interesting idea. And you show up.

I get that feeling a lot I in near our offices in Union Square in New York, there’s like a giant climate clock that’s just like counting down all the time. And sometimes that feeling is so oppressive, that that desperation and that hopelessness, but there are so many other moments, when we take a second and just slow down and stop and stop letting the world the pace of the world dictate our own personal pace, we can find those moments from love.

Definitely. You can change channels to all that is sort of funny and lovely and still works. There was a priest in the 30s, who helped Bill Wilson get AA off the ground. Although he wasn’t an alcoholic, and he told Bill, sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses. And so if you have the intention, or the need to put on a better pair of glasses, like you could go outside right now if you’re having a bad day, and everything just seems like it’s in ruins are heading there. And you could sit, sit outside for 10 minutes. And it was a good pair of glasses on and your heart would be so uplifted by people being kind to each other and, and funny, little kids doing funny things, and old people doing beautiful funny things and the dogs that passed by and run up to you and let you pet them. And you know, and you get your sense of humor back. And I’ve always said that laughter is carbonated holiness. So when you get your sense of humor back, you’re hopefully home.

Having that sense of humor and that ability to take a step back from everything that pushes all the time on us and, and sort of drags at us. I think it’s really helpful and something different. I think sometimes people are like too afraid to laugh about things or to laugh about our situation. Because sometimes you can’t, sometimes it is too dire or too much. But there are these moments where we have to remember like, we’re all humans, we’re all doing this for the first time.

We’re finding our way as we go. And we all are sort of messed up deep inside and we’re all healing slowly, one day at a time, it’s going all more slowly than I would like. But you know, life doesn’t have a magic wand. It doesn’t tap you on the head and you’re suddenly restored to equanimity and pleasure in the theater of the absurd that is all around us. It doesn’t happen like that. But you know, little by little, we start to get a sense of curiosity. My husband’s book is called better days taming your inner critic, and it’s about changing the channel from the voice inside you from childhood that is kindly pointing out all the little mistakes you’re making, and instead is turning the channel to curiosity. And in his book, he talks about curiosity as a synonym for joy. But I’d say curiosity, Joy awareness, are the options are one option. The other option is whose fault it is and how to get them to see the error of their ways and come crawling back to you for forgiveness. So you know, we all know how well that’s gone. You have

A quote in Somehow that I wrote down because I need to like tape it to my mirror or my computer or something. It says curiosity leads to wonder, wonder is a cousin to love and wonder is why we’re here that like, you know, reading it has just one things from like, Oh, of course, but I think that’s also why we read and why we write and why we make art and why we do the all those things, because that is another way we can find that wonder and that love and that joy.

Yeah. And get our sense of curiosity about not to turn this into a religious discussion. But Jesus famously says you have to become like a small child to get into the kingdom of heaven. But let’s say that heaven is a new pair of glasses where you are seeing, seeing how beautiful is it right outside my window as we speak, daffodils have just bloomed. And I found this flower yesterday, while taking a walk. It was like a tiny orange balloon, it was inflated like a tiny helium balloon. And on the backside, there were red leopard stripes, oh my God, but to become like a child takes a willingness to be vulnerable, and to not be protected from what life might throw at you if you’re not paying attention and girded for, you know, and my friend Duncan Trussell, the comedian says that when you first meet him, you’re meeting his bodyguard. And so you have you when you’re aware of that you can take I’m gonna let my body guard go to the library. And I’m just going to be the little child that I arrived here as and I’m going to see what is blooming right now, right outside the window.

This world we live in, in so many ways wants us to be hard. It wants us to be guarded and puffed up and always aiming for the next fight or looking for the next struggle. Yeah, but I think that we’ve seen like you said, we’ve seen where that’s gotten us, and it’s gotten us here. And now we’re at this pivotal moment where really, really change is needed to go forward.

Well, when I got sober in 1986, when I was 32. A person who had been sober for a while said that the willingness comes from the pain, the willingness to change, if we don’t change when everything’s going more or less, okay, or and we’re not uncomfortable, we change when we’re uncomfortable, or we understand the deep emptiness that our way has brought us to, you know, we were raised this way to have the body guard and to keep people from knowing us too well, because we were sure if they did they, they, you know, be appalled. They’d run screaming for their cute little lives, you know, and we were raised to be in this American way of forward thrust that everything leads to improvement or to bringing that B plus up to an A minus or it’s all about doing better and appearing to be doing better. And it leaves you absolutely empty. It’s a form of death. And when you have some kind of awakening, where you have had a moment of clarity where you see it’s just made you crazy, this endless effort to achieve or you know, the hustle and the striving. Where did it get you it’s like Lily Tomlin, that great line that she said, The problem with winning at the rat race is you’re still a rat, you know, and all this stuff that we were taught to do and to achieve and to do better at and appear to be doing better at with variation on the rat race. And when you decide, I don’t know what the future holds, but I am not a rat. I’m a regular old human being, you know, a little funky around the edges.

I don’t want to be a rat at this point. And I know that being a human even if I’m tired, and even if I’m a little worn down. That’s okay, too. Sometimes.

Well, it’s, uh, you read the Velveteen Rabbit when you were a little kid, it’s like, you know, you agree to be loved. And it means a lot of your fur is going to get rubbed off and when your button eyes is gonna pop off and you’re becoming real. And being human is not all that comfortable. If you were raised thinking, Oh, don’t let them know that or don’t let that show no matter what, keep your weight down. The most important thing — never cry, never this. And all of a sudden you decide to be human and real. I’m a huge proponent of crying if you I mean, in every book I think that I’ve written I’ve mentioned that. I was taught, my mother is English and I was taught you don’t cry. The English don’t cry. What I learned was that crying was going to heal me, it was going to bathe me, it was going to baptize me, it was going to hydrate me. And it was going to water the ground at my feet where God knows what crazy seeds birds flying overhead may have dropped in the soil right around me. So you know a lot of my becoming human and becoming real and becoming fully alive has been about unlearning stuff. I was taught as a child, you know with Bird by Bird and when I’m teaching writing, I you know, I begged them to over print out paper, not to do edit on with on the computer that you need to print it out at every stage and then send more money to the Sierra Club, you know, and it balances out. And I’ve taught them they were taught not to stare off into space. You know, when they were, we were all looking off kind of, you know, into the middle distance I could cat trying to figure out something about life or the neighbors are different ways of living here in the world. And an adult would always come along and say, Don’t you have homework? Or is your room picked up or so I’ll teach you waste paper, waste paper, waste paper, you know, I mean, on a desk with no paper on it was scrolls and scribbles to me it’s not a very fertile field to do your writing from.

I agree with that here. My desk is always covered with I don’t know I call it my like murderer’s notebook of things that I collect together and glue back in and scroll down to make sure I have it all in one place.

Same, same, same same. And, you know, bits of paper, bits of napkins, with notes on them that have two words that I need to remember, you know, and when we were children, if we couldn’t come up with somebody that someone’s like, wow, if that was important, you’ll remember it. But I’m finishing a piece right now for The Washington Post. And while I was walking today, I remembered the two exact words, I already submitted it to my editor. And I remembered the two words that I hadn’t been able to come up with last night when I sent it off. And it was time and I wrote them on a bit of napkin that was in my pocket. And it’s magic, you know, my editor loves those two words and the piece is better for him. So all of this unlearning that you know that we don’t need to keep people out that is not going to protect us. There’s a lot in the new book about how we grow up thinking all this stuff like doing well, doing better, basically doing perfectly. And you know, and Bird by Bird, I wrote a whole chapter on perfectionism because it’s the voice of the enemy and of the oppressor and more than anything, it will keep you crazy, your whole life. We all that stuff that we learned, don’t keep going and people and God don’t make mistakes, you’re supposed to make a decision and then stick with it. And you don’t you don’t change your mind I was raised you don’t change your mind, I was raised thinking that it’d be plus was a bit of a failing and was their time in the quarter to bring it up. And so I’m 70 soon and it’s taken time to believe it, I knew it. But I didn’t kind of grok it, I didn’t know it on a cellular level, that it was true. And that it was the way home making more mistakes, you know, making more mistakes, wasting more paper, staring off into space more often, you know, whatever.

One of the best things about being human, I think is our ability to change that we can grow that we can have opinions and then learn more and have differing thoughts that that nothing is static, we get to keep going. I think something so wonderful about your work and about the career you’ve been able to have is you can sort of revisit these topics and I wonder if you find yourself going back to things and noticing that you’ve changed or that you’ve grown or you read something you’ve written before and thought Yes, but there’s more now.

I don’t know, I’ve been on the path of recovery and spirituality, and you know, radical self love and acceptance of my very mixed up self for so long and so more than thinking it got something wrong, it like amplifies it and if it wasn’t quite there, I may be able to use it as a jumping off place to do a deeper dive into that topic. But I you know, I think the stuff the steps that I believe is truth is it’s all out there and a lot of writers better than I have written about it have written about being vulnerable have written about scribbling like look at Julia Cameron’s wonderful books on writing, The Artist’s Way and on becoming fully human and on how to quiet the pond instead of you know, being addicted to that caffeinated energy of whipping the pond up because it’s so mood altering to either have a crisis or an impossible deadline. I love all that stuff. But I’ve learned what I love more is for the pond to settle and to be able to breathe quietly and with my eyes closed and just to feel the hum of the universe and hum of my living room couch you know the purr of the kitty and the purr of my inside self. So you know when I first got sober this woman named Sharon was very old, was trying to help me I was very lost and angry and smelly. And she said you get to decide every day If you want to hit or you want to Serenity, and I said, pull da I want to hit. You know, I love a lot of energy. I love caffeinated life I love. I drink two cups of coffee a day. So not a complete coffee. But I love those psychic hits of love a good crisis without intervention. I love a deadline that I’m not going to be able to meet. And then, but I get to ask myself like said, Do I want that? Or do I want the serenity and I really, maybe it’s because I’m old. I really want the serenity I love when the pond settles, and then you can see into it. And you can see all sorts of funny and touching and charming and magical things growing inside and floating around and floating by.

Those still spaces I think now are so often where we can go to combat this world that’s so preoccupied with the speed, but also that seems to be the way that the world creates so much hate. And I use that in like a broad sense, not specific. But yeah, it’s hard to keep hating when you are sitting in that stillness.

It really is I wrote a piece, it was either in the last book or the one before that was about hate, because I was having so much hatred for one of our national political figures. And it was making me toxic, it was just making me crazy. And my pastor said, she quoted Martin Luther King, don’t let them get you to hate them. Because as soon as when you do, you’ve lost your center, you’ve lost your goodness, you’ve lost your core, and you’ve lost your ability to be a part of those working for the common good. And so I did some really hard work on that, and then wrote about it. But you know, the hate is really mood altering. That’s why people hate so much is because if you’re hating someone, it means you don’t have to feel your own losses, or your own disappointments, or your own fear, it means you get to project it all out onto people that you think are beneath you, or doing something so evil and wrong, and there’s no hope on their on that path, there’s just the fix, there’s just a hit of tempo of that victimized self righteousness, you know, and so, but the speed of everything is, I mean, I just have a 15 year old grandchild, boy, and I just watched the I just watched a total addiction to whatever’s happening on the phone and the Switch, I don’t even know if you know what that is, but it seems to be a kind of a handheld Nintendo product, and there might be a laptop, it’s like this whole telecommunications empire, because one thing can’t keep up with the speed of what he and his friends are up to. And so that was part of what I wanted to say. And somehow was, well, the willingness comes from the pain. And when it all comes tumbling down. And you realize how much time you squandered and how, what all that energy didn’t amount to self confidence or a lighted pathway for your next phase of life or, or the deep healing to have the self doubt that every single human on Earth has, or a healing of the narcissism an ego that every single person on earth, pretty much I’m sure you’re finding that there. It’s like the ping pong game, you know, of self doubt, I wrote about it and Bird by Bird self doubt and ego, self doubt and ego. And the willingness to stop to kind of grab yourself by the wrist and say, Annie stop is the beginning of finding something that really does deliver, which is going to be real connection. And it’s going to be real, probably silence, which of course is terrifying for a lot of people for a lot of their lives. And again, it’s going to be love. It is somehow going to be about love.

All those distractions, and the phone and the video games and the, you know, barrage of everything that we can have at our fingertips in a moment. It really keeps us isolated. It keeps us all so separate. Even when we’re talking to someone online. It’s not quite the same as the community that we can find in other aspects when we’re open and willing and have the ability to slow down enough to stay in one place with some people.

Well, as I said, it’s mood altering, you know, if you’re a regular old human being, which I definitely am, then you’re going to have a lot of fear here. There’s a great acronym for fear and the recovery movement. Well, there’s about 10 of them. One is Future Events Already Ruined. You know, we’re afraid to get in our turnout. Well, we’re not going to get what we hope to get or some can interrupt at it. But the one I love is the Frantic Effort to Appear Recovered that frantic driving effort to appear to be doing fine. And which is what we were raised to do No, especially in my mom’s English. So it’s all you know, stiff upper lip. And let me when we were not fine at the dinner table, we got sent to our room without eating if we had were teary or angry. And so your whole life, in my experience, if you’re terior angry, there’s, there’s a punishment coming. And I got Oh, for people, when I was a child would say, Oh, for Christ’s sake, Annie, now what am my husband might do a variation of that, although he’s adores me. But if I have an anger about something that he doesn’t get, there’s going to be the roll dice, and oh, really, you know, and so but all of that stuff, also scary bad feelings, if we just don’t the distractions, as you call them, are detours away from the flecks of gold in the mind, you know, but we think what they’re doing is saving us or protecting us or sheltering us somehow. But really what they’re doing is steering us away for what is real, and what is deeply nourishing, and human, you know, and makes life much, much more spacious than it is when we stay kind of in this box of who everybody seems to like us to be. You know, the ancient Greeks I wrote about this in some book, rather, the ancient Greeks called God “the really real”. You know, it wasn’t like this nice old man in the sky. It wasn’t a fairy god, dad, it was the really real, the sky, the earth love, intimacy, connection, generous heart, like when you have gone from being kind of clenched up. And I know you’ve never experienced this, but you’re kind of uptight, and bristly and planning revenge. And something happens, the movement of grace somehow causes the plates of the earth to shift and all of a sudden you feel a generosity in your heart. That to me is what heaven on earth is like, and you can’t get from where you were to feeling that warmth and generosity in your heart. And so that, that hints at some other realm besides our intellectual minds, and what we can see and tune into and can find a link for

I understand what you’re saying, when you talk about sort of being told not to act certain ways. I’m Midwestern at heart and in the Midwest, you just put a smile on over everything. Oh, yeah. And it really, it keeps you very limited into how you learn how to experience these things. Also, how you learn to love how you learn to accept love, when it’s directed back at you. I think that’s a big piece is that maybe we don’t know how to be loved by others in so many ways. And it’s hard to learn when you are scared and you know, trying so hard to like you said keep that bodyguard there.

And we weren’t taught that we are love you know, we’re just he’s you know, you see his bumper sticker I hate to be reduced to bumper stickers but it says we’re not human beings having spiritual experiences. We’re spiritual being beings having human experiences, you know, and I really love that and when if you tapped into this kind of aware, this will Ram Dass called it loving awareness. And that’s our identity. If you tapped into that, as a child or anywhere along the line, a people thought you were crazy, be it wasn’t efficient, and they weren’t grading you on it. So you’re wasting your time and see you are full of yourself. And so to stop that train, and to say, I wonder if there’s a glade inside of me where I just am loving awareness, where I just have this pair of glasses on where I’m seeing sweetness and little sources of light and you know, it’s a little more floaty than I’ve been able to be here so far. And that’s lovely. You know, loved lightening up is so lovely to start taking some rocks out of your backpack that you carried forever, you know, they were your parents rocks and you agreed to carry them for your parents, your parents bad self esteem or anxiety and you put all this stupid stuff in your backpack and the willingness comes from the pain and at some point you go I don’t know how long I’m gonna live. I mean, typically somebody your own age dies when you’re a younger person and you realize we’re all on borrowed time and that you don’t want to live with this heavy 50 pound backpack everywhere you go and you start to take a look at it. What can I let go? Well, you know, letting go is not you know, I hate when people say well, let’s call it that God I just want to hurt them. Because if I could have I would have believed me. And but what it takes is probably your best friend probably call your best girlfriend in and asking her to come join you in the process of lightning or just to hear you just to say, I’ve been carrying my mother’s obsession with weight for 50 years now. And I’m afraid to let go of it. Because I’m afraid I’ll be able to control. But I’m wondering if you think this might be something I could get a lessening of a lightening of some help for, so that I could be here now and the reality of my day, instead of what I’m going to eat next Saturday when I have to go to dinner at those crazy, you know what I mean? So, for me, it doesn’t just happen, I don’t just go, Oh, I just longed to have a float here, time here, I longed to have an immediacy, if you don’t have, you’ve got sort of that Plexiglas between you and the daffodils and each other, like we’re really connecting right now. Because our faces are so close together on this thing, but mostly, we just have plexiglass up you know, to protect you. And so that you can kind of curate your life before other people see it. And you all have said long to have immediacy, I want to be here for this one. Like, I want to feel the air on my skin, I want to feel the dirt, where the daffodils are growing, I planted bulbs, and it was rocky and cold that but when all else fails, follow instructions. So I planted bulbs in December. And now I want to feels I want to feel the dirt. It’s wet, you know what I mean? So it’s like this whole thing of returning to who we were born to be, who we were socialized out of being, usually because we were being graded for it.

And returning to that vulnerability, and that, that sense of whole personas and saying yes, this is this is it. This is for better or worse. And something I love about your messages is that you never pull the punch on what might be the or worse or for better or worse. But you’re always right there alongside us, which I think shows that you know, sometimes in your writing, you have these asides where you reassure us don’t worry if you were having a terrible thought there. So was I appreciate that in this sort of World of Wellness and love and spirituality.

Yeah, I think it’s really hard here. And every TV, commercial, every TV show, and commercial, every ad, everything we’ve seen in magazines, everything tells us that if we just do this, if we buy this, start using that, stop doing that, stop using that, if we go we can that if we can figure out how to buy it, lease it, date it, achieve it or get to it, then it won’t be so hard you’re in it’s just a crock. You know, it’s an inside job. But I think one of the reasons that the people like my work do is because I keep saying it’s really appropriate to be afraid, you know, it’s scary here. It’s scary. And it’s getting scarier, and it’s really scary for our young people. And I think this might help. And I wouldn’t even bother trying that.

And through writing and reading, I think is one of the best ways to communicate that as a message and communicate to the generations that follow us. Because we’re you know, there’s so so much of us looking towards writing of the past to say, either, how has it gotten better or worse, or at least the reassurance that other people have went through it too.

Huge. I mean, that’s why I wrote Bird by Bird because up until then most of the writing books, except for the great brand new humans book cut shins, it’s like 80 year old book. But anyway, everything else said, Oh, if you do this, you use this type of outline this structure. If you if you remember, this was setting and character and plot and you do this, you’ll almost certainly be met with success. Well, it was a lie. You know, if there’s 1000 people to writing conference, five of them are going to get published in any way at all that changes your life. That’s just statistically true. And so what I wanted to say is, it’s not out there, you know, in the success, if you get published, you’re going to feel even more crazy than you do right now. Because probably almost certainly going to be really disappointing. You’re going to be frustrated, frustrated, you have two weeks on a bookshelf, before that. Next there’s 250,000 general interest books, including novels, poems, you know, I want to say that’s not where the goods are, the goods are at getting some work done every day. For me also talk about the goods. Reading is where I found salvation like other people find salvation and Jesus or the Buddha. I was a really early reader because there was an extremely worried child and I could read I just broke the code by four. And pretty soon by about five That’s chapter books. And when I discovered that you could read Some pages of these people that’s a writer had created a world, a very detailed world in which you could get completely lost that in that, you are going to get completely found that they were somehow holding up a mirror. And they were saying, yeah, yeah, I’m just like that I’m just the same. And then the miracle, you could put down the book to go to sleep. And when you woke up, the story would continue, you put your picture book back up. And to this day, last night, when I got in bed, and I picked up the book, I was in the middle of it, I felt that same feeling of gratitude and relief and found nearness, you know, by good writing. And I feel that, you know, I’ve always said libraries and bookstores are churches. They were church, while my family we were our family was atheist literature, you know, very high literary intellectuals. We went to the library every Thursday, every Thursday night and stocked up for the weekend. That was a healthiest, saddest thing my family did. And then this is in the 50s. There’s a tiny little bookstore at the in the county seat, which is about 15 minutes from where I live. And then it was just kind of a old, like hippie bookstore, a beatnik bookstore, and you wandered around the shelves, you didn’t always have a plan. But you wandered around the shelves, there used to be a bookstore here, I loved it was called Paper ships. You know, and that’s what books are. And that’s what bookstores are pay per ship, you get on these books. And you travel to a place that you might not get be able to get to otherwise.

For me, there’s no greater act of communion than reading I think some people act like it’s a solitary experience. But for me, that could not be more untrue. For me, I never feel more connected than when I’m in the midst of a story.

Oh, yeah, I agree completely. It’s a relationship, there is a writer who said, like you know, 10,000, or 20,000, or 50,000 years ago, people gathered around the campfire, and someone was going to tell them a story. And what you’re saying is sure, I’ll sit down, and you sit down, and that establishes a relationship, and you’re kind of looking into each other psychic guys. And the writer is bringing their very best selves, their soul, their brain, their heart. And then they’re saying, I have a story that I think you might find kind of interesting. And the reader is saying, Oh, cool. That’s literally and I mean, it’s literally my favorite thing on earth is a good story, right? care about the characters, and I’m transported. It’s my favorite thing on earth.

And there’s nothing like getting a great recommendation and just like feeling seen by that other person that they would know what you’d like, though, sometimes you do find out what people actually think about you by what they may suggest. And then it can go both ways. Definitely. I wonder who are some of your big literary influences that really have shaped who you are as a writer, or something that you’ve been reading recently that has really felt and resonated with you?

I have since I’ve gotten older I get in bed with really good thrillers almost exclusively by women now. And so the ones I love who are so literary and but such page turners, that to me is the ticket to ride. I love Kate Atkinson. I love Jane Harper. She’s the Australian writer, The Dry, I bet you read it. She’s written about four books. And each one is its transportive it takes you to the Outback takes you to the cities of Australia. When I was coming up, I can say that my life begins with Beverly Cleary she you know, and, and Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web and then and then Madeline L’Engle, you know, and A Wrinkle in Time, and then I’m a teenager, and it’s Vonnegut. And then it’s Joseph Heller, and it’s Adrienne Rich and it’s the feminist poets. And then but in my 20s I became someone actively seeking spirituality. So I read who you read, I read Ram Dass and Thomas Merton, and I read Denise Levertov. And you know, and then later I discovered Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds, a great New York City poet and I as a writer, you have to be immersed in poetry, if you want to take the next step. And I loved Olds and I love to my father loved and foisted on me I loved and was really influenced by EB White. And then I loved I was in my early 20s When I read my first Margaret Atwood book, can you believe that? That’s almost 50 years ago, it’s called surfacing think I was 23 and a feminist writer, already Doris Lessing, who is my mother’s Goddess, and then later Later I discovered Nora Ephron and that you get to be really funny and other great Laurie Colwin. Happy All the Time who died way, way too young. I probably bought 20 books and her estate owes me to foist on people over the years. Those are some of the people that have really influenced me.

And having that connection and just that joy of getting to recount those moments that connect, it’s just, is there anything better? I mean, I was saying, Is there anything better than to live a life with books, I don’t think so.

And also, with my writing students, I always tell them, if you if you want to be a writer, you are once you start writing, and if you are writing, then you get to enter into the literary life, which is like a calling. It’s like a monk being called to the monastery, because you’re writing every day, that’s your practice. You’re reading poetry, and that’s your scripture. And you’re in community of other writers, a couple other people who will help you with your work, who will read your stuff for for you, and you’ll read their stuff for them and made you maybe you’re in a writing group, my son has a writing community called a writing a writing room.com, where there’s 500 writers helping each other, you have a community, and you have a path. And you know, the very, very best stuff to read. You read all those old Paris Review interviews with writers from 80 years ago, a writer at work, you read Stephen King On Writing you read, you know, you read about reading, and you read the masters, you read the best books you can find so that you see how other people are getting time to pass. You know, in the movies, you have the clocks been in the hands of the clocks whenever you have pages through the calendar flying out the window, but you can’t do that on the written page. How do they get three years to pass? Well, the old dogs muzzle turns gray or your own muzzle turns gray, or the tree finally finally finally grows fruit. But so it’s a whole life and I as a because it’s my life, I can’t help but thing is one of the absolutely richest, most profound, wonderful lives. And it doesn’t have to do with publication, publication would be a huge gift in many ways. And you can aim for that. And there are a million things online tell you how to steer yourself towards that. But it doesn’t have to happen for it to be a life that when you are old and on the porch, you absolutely not will not regret having pursued.

And just to be amongst those, those names and to submit yourself between the pages and really give yourself over to it. I think you can tell when you’re reading a writer, whether it’s something that you know, is a classic in the canon or a pamphlet that someone hands to you on the subway, you can feel when someone’s heart is in that book. Did anything surprise you as you were writing Somehow? Did anything really come that you didn’t expect when you’re putting this together?

Yeah, you know, I think I’ve said this in the book is one thing you get when you’re older, and you think you probably should know so much is you get how little you really know, you know, and it’s such a relief and really a blessing because you kind of get to do what we talked about earlier is start over. In Zen, they will call it beginner’s mind to get to realize you can revert to curiosity and to in a religious tradition, they talk about the great mystery, you can enter into that and find a few puddings, you know, and a little light shining in tiny parts of the garden to go sit in without a preconceived sense of what you’re going to see there. And what you’ll feel like as you experience what you are pretty sure you’re gonna see there, right? You just go and you sit there. But I was really surprised by how many different realms of love, I was able to tap into and have an openness to finding a story to share about that, and a memory on which to build a story. How didn’t occur to me that everything I know that might be helpful to my son and grandson ultimately has to do with love.

I can’t wait for people to feel that and to put their own stories among yours and to fill this with their own memories.

Well, there’s that on Facebook, the publicist put up a quote from the book. And then she asked the question, what does love look like to you? And there’s just hundreds of answers and they’re just so touching. You know, they there’s ecstatic love, there’s romantic love, but the joy is quieter. Love its connection with a best friend who can hear your deepest truth and tell you hers or his soul connection between the newest baby in the family. It’s a connection towards the tribal elder who has just always been there for you who’s maybe getting a little funny now, but who is cherished as is or, you know, all the different forms, loves takes — I wrote that one thing in the beginning, I don’t know if you remember, but that love is the bench. Somebody in our neighborhood made a bench for us. You know, before my son was born, it’s a community bench and people sit there and the homeless sit there in the tired sit there, and the injured sit there. And this 93 year old man named Jesse who walks past my house every day sits there and rest. It’s only maybe it’s a four minute walk and he needs a rest. And then he turns around, he’s seen the sky. He’s seen the park, he’s seen the grass, he’s seen the daffodils. He’s seen the moon, the Earth, you know. And he sits on his bench. And I sit there and one story with a homeless man who does not want to seem to be interested in what I have to share. And it’s funny. I mean, you know, it’s when you’re telling the truth it turns out to be universal and be it turns out to be kind of sweet.

And love is all those things and more and people will bring all of their own stuff good and bad to it. And that’s what it is. And that’s why we read and that’s why we write. So and thank you so much.

Oh, you had great questions. I could talk forever. I really appreciate you.

Thank you so much. And Somehow: Thoughts on Love is going to be out now and I hope everyone gets their copy soon.

Thank you. Thank you everybody.