She Taps Inner Strength to Cast Off Gloves--and Armor

FAIRFAX —  The white VW bug in the garage and the sign at the entrance--Hippies Use Side Door--signal that this is where Anne Lamott lives. It’s a light-filled house on a knoll in this Marin County town of 7,500 with its bohemian ‘60s sensibility.

“You probably saw more tie-dye today than you’ve seen in years, right?” says Lamott, opening the door. She’s wearing jeans and a casual shirt and her signature dreadlocks are slightly askew, one “sticking up like a little antenna.”

Kicking off her shoes, she settles into a chair, unruffled in the midst of domestic chaos. While remodeling a bathroom, workmen had flooded the floor, broken through the wrong wall and messed up the electricity, causing the food in the fridge to go bad.

It’s something that might have happened to a character in a book by Lamott, who has built her considerable reputation largely writing about real life, notably in “Operating Instructions,” her 1993 breakthrough memoir chronicling the challenges of the first year of single motherhood, when she was punching holes in walls, “crazy and furious and desperate and still trying to do the best job I could.”

Pantheon paid $35,000 for it, to her then a “king’s ransom,” and, she says, “nobody expected this crabby, black-humored, political baby book to sell at all,” but it became a bestseller--Lamott’s first big deal.

She writes funny, even on serious subjects. Wracked with guilt over punishing son Sam, she felt as though she were “buzzing Bambi with a cattle prod.”

Due out Oct. 1 is “Blue Shoe” (Riverhead), a novel whose protagonist, Mattie Ryder, a realistic size 12 with jiggly thighs, is a recently divorced mother of two young children coping with the emotional needs of her kids and the demands of her aging mother and hoping to find love with Mr. Right.

Publishers Weekly says Lamott “brilliantly captures the dilemma of a divorced woman from the so-called ‘sandwich generation’ ... a funny, poignant and occasionally gut-wrenching novel.” Kirkus Reviews mentions the author’s infusion of her “quirky brand of Christianity” and concludes of the novel, “Lots of charm in the details, not much for momentum.”

At 48, with a 13-year-old son, Lamott has never married and has “waited a long time for a really nice man.” She recently has found one and is in a relationship with a South African art director for a San Francisco advertising agency.

A woman who has admitted to having just about every addiction--except gambling--drugs and alcohol, she has been sober for 16 years. She’s also had a bout with bulimia. Reared as a nonbeliever, she has embraced Christianity with a fervor that spills onto the pages of her books and, she acknowledges, turns off some readers. She shrugs, “They should write their own book. I’m not everybody’s cup of tea.”

She experienced her religious conversion 17 years ago, as a drunk attracted to the singing coming from St. Andrew, a small, predominantly African American church in Marin City, where she still worships. Lamott rejects the label “born-again Christian”--”I think that’s stronger than we need to be, and it’s so Pat Robertson. I’m just a hard-core left-wing activist who believes that everyone goes to heaven.”

She’d been “dodging Christianity all through my 20s and early 30s. My father hated it so much. He was a child of missionaries.” Of her finding Jesus, she has observed, her intellectual left-wing nonbeliever friends “would have been less appalled if I had developed a close personal friendship with Strom Thurmond.”

Lamott has rejected friends’ suggestions that she tone down religion in her writing. She doesn’t want to write novels like most of those she reads, in which people “don’t believe in anything. It’s all hopeless. The only world I’m interested in showing you around is animated by beliefs and humanity. I’m as confused and self-centered and angry as anyone, but that’s the world I can be the tour guide for.”

Lamott’s writing focuses on four themes--anger, grief, faith and friendship. She harbors a lot of anger, much of it directed toward her parents--her writer father Kenneth, who died of a brain tumor when she was 25, and her mother, who died last year, leaving Lamott with unresolved issues.

“My parents had an awful marriage and stayed married for 28 years,” she says. She grew up in Marin County, one of three children--and the only girl--in a household where “there was a Harold Pinter play unfolding all the time.” Intellectual discussions were encouraged, but shows of emotion weren’t permitted.

“Everything was about armor and appearance. My mission has been to get some of the armor off, and be more of a visible mess, and talk about it in a way that’s funny so people can say, ‘Thank you. Me, too.’ ” She smiles and says, “I was a grown-up, and probably drunk, before I yelled at somebody.”

The drinking started when she was an overweight teenager, as did drugs, which she discovered would make her thin. She wasn’t the class beauty, nor an A student, so she assumed the role of “flight attendant, geisha, to the family and the world, in order to be of value. I was a therapist, a marriage counselor to my parents.”

Her mother passed on to her the ‘50s attitude about the value of women and girls, who were taught that “you were your teeth and your breasts and your skin tones.”

Lamott struggled with bulimia--being almost invisible was the goal--and for 15 years has been in therapy, learning “to stop having to be the light in people’s lives” and to understand that “a man can love me if I have flabby arms.” (Today, she eats whatever she wants and is of healthy weight).

Her writing is so personal that the reader feels she is baring her darkest secrets. In reality, Lamott says, “I think of it as kind of a bull’s-eye. In the center is my most private stuff. Three or four rings out is the stuff I write about.”

She thinks she resonates with readers because “the stuff I talk about is universal--the grief, the anger, stuff about women’s bodies, the conflicted feelings of motherhood, the hostility toward your parents.” She has “always loved books where people tell the truth. When people tell the truth, it’s like finding an English language station in Morocco.”

Not surprisingly, she likes funny, outspoken women and staunch political women, including Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Texas Gov. Ann Richards and Lamott’s good friend, columnist Molly Ivins. She admires writers Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Munro, Fran Leibowitz and Marianne Williamson, and singer Bonnie Raitt.

“Blue Shoe” is her sixth novel. She also has written three nonfiction books. As a teenager, she knew writing was her calling and wrote a column while at Goucher College in Baltimore, then a women’s college that she chose because it was her mother’s alma mater, and there were “many brilliant feminist professors there stirring things up. Also, I got in, and that attracted me.” Radcliffe and Wellesley turned her down.

She stayed only two years. Moving to San Francisco at 19, she worked as a clerk typist--”I was terrible at it and wrote short stories a lot of the day and threw out things that were supposed to get filed that confused or upset me.”

At night, she wrote and drank wine at coffeehouses. Later, in Bolinas, a counterculture town on the Pacific, she cleaned houses and taught tennis so she could write. She also “took a lot of LSD and other psychedelic drugs” and “got drunk every night.”

There, she wrote “Hard Laughter,” a love letter to her father, who was dying of brain cancer. Published by Viking in 1980, it was her first book sale. A few years later she moved to Sausalito, renting space on a houseboat, where she wrote “Joe Jones” with help from a Guggenheim fellowship.

The novel is set in Petaluma, where she’d waited tables at a waterfront dive. During three years on the houseboat, Lamott survived by writing magazine articles and food reviews until getting an advance for her “first sober book,” her 1989 novel “All New People,” about a comically dysfunctional family.

Lamott has written extensively about her struggle with alcoholism and cocaine and of her tumultuous private life, which has included two abortions.

When she became pregnant with Sam, she says, “I wrote a note to God--’I’d love to have a kid if this is the kid I’m supposed to have.’ ” Certain events led her to believe that God said yes.

“He is a brilliant, gifted child,” she says of Sam, “even though he doesn’t read for pleasure.”

The phone rings, and Lamott jumps up, joking that it might be Oprah. It’s the local garage.

Sam comes home from school, a friend in tow, and they retreat to his downstairs bedroom, which Lamott refers to as his “illegal Hugh Hefner pad.”

This house is a work in progress. She bought it three years ago, moving from a nearby home where she was “writing in the garage” and thinking that “a real writer should be able to close the door in a testy way. Actually, I might be reading the new People magazine, but no one would find out.”

When they moved in, the house was falling apart. “They forgot to put in a wall. They just covered up everything.” She is certain that Ebola and black fungi lurk behind boards. A waterbed had burst and buckled floors. Eight resident cats had left a lingering urine odor. The living room, now a soft gold, was purple. But, Lamott says, “we got it for a song.”

She now has a home office but no current writing project. “In a perfect world, I’d write more spiritual essays. A novel takes so much more stamina than nonfiction.” She’d also like to resume the online essays she wrote for Salon.com from 1996 to 1999.

“I’m a very slow writer,” she says, and five pages can take a week, “even though it comes out sounding like I just said it.” Typically, she drops off Sam at school around 8:30 a.m., comes home and putters until settling down to four or five hours of writing time. “Puttering makes me happy. I love to fold laundry. I love to wash dishes. I have a gift.” She laughs and says she is like Rainman meets the Unabomber, puttering away while her mind spins wildly. “I think too much. I have a thinking disorder.”

She runs the church school at St. Andrew, which means she also is “the peanut-butter-and-jelly minister,” rounding up volunteers to make sandwiches with a “sanctioned jam,” kid-friendly red.

Humor is her defense against darkness, a tool for coping in a world that she--and Sam--find broken. “I do see the world as an AIDS baby. Everyone’s going to die and that’s very frightening.”

In a world in which “most people are starving and in deprivation,” she believes that laughter heals.

“I find it just hard to be a human being most of the time,” says Lamott, for whom standing in the express line at the supermarket, elbow to elbow with strangers, is a trial that “makes me want to live on what I can grow.”

She is “absolutely, positively sure” there is a heaven, a realm where spirits live “after our bodies break down like old cars.” A pet lover who has a gray striped cat named Jeanie, she believes, too, that “our pets wait for us at the bridge between heaven and Earth and run across the planks to escort us over.”

She hopes to land in a smoking area, even though she has kicked a three-packs-a-day unfiltered Camels habit. “I think smokers and Jewish people are inherently more interesting than other people.”

There’s another thing she hopes for in heaven: “I want to be in the room with the desserts.”