AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Each week, a guest draws a card from NPR’s Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Anne Lamott says that she felt drawn to writing almost like it was a call to become a monk. She’s also felt called to teach others how to write and to help them organize their thoughts on the page. Her newest book, which she co-wrote with her husband Neal Allen, is called “Good Writing: 36 Ways To Improve Your Sentences.”
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ANNE LAMOTT: I want to teach people that the writing is where the action is – the writing, the collaborating, the writer life of reading, of studying, of sitting at the feet of the masters, of – you know, it’s wonderful to get published, too. I mean, but it’s not what you’re looking for.
CHANG: Lamott spoke with Wild Card host Rachel Martin about what it means to be human.
RACHEL MARTIN: What’s something you thought about yourself that you had to unlearn?
LAMOTT: I had to unlearn – I mean, my parents taught me great values. They were civil rights activists. We were marching for, you know, just all the great good causes. And they taught me to read. I was reading very early. They gave me the value of literature and libraries, you know, the greatest American institution besides the Constitution. And – but I had to learn everything – almost everything they taught me – ’cause it was the ’50s, and they taught me that girls look a certain way. Well, I was never going to look like the other girls. I had this really crazy, wiry hair. And it grew up and sideways. It didn’t grow down. And I was – I got bullied, and the bullying gave me my sense of humor because I discovered that if a boy with other boys had a drive-by insult on a bike and I thought of something to throw at him, the other boys would laugh at him, and I would be a little bit better.
And – but so what I had to unlearn was that what other people thought of me was who I was or had anything to do with who I was. And I had to learn just from the bottom up that I was not what men thought of me or East Coast literary men, and – or I was not what the really cool teenage boys or girls thought of me, that I was this precious, hilarious, wise girl and then woman who was kind and generous and kind of a mess like we all are. Like, if there’s…
MARTIN: Yeah.
LAMOTT: If there isn’t something wrong with you, I’m not interested…
MARTIN: Right (laughter).
LAMOTT: …You know? If there isn’t something wrong with you, we’re seriously going to have almost nothing to talk about at dinner. So maybe sit somewhere else. So – and I had to learn that that was what it meant to be human…
MARTIN: Yeah.
LAMOTT: …Was to be real…
MARTIN: Yeah.
LAMOTT: …And to be vulnerable…
MARTIN: Yeah.
LAMOTT: …And to be who you actually were…
MARTIN: Yeah.
LAMOTT: …Instead of who you always agreed to be because you got good grades.
MARTIN: For sure.
LAMOTT: I love that old Anais Nin quote, and I’ll probably get it wrong, but something about staying in bud…
MARTIN: Oh, my gosh. Oh, God. Sorry, now I need to find it ’cause I want to read it out loud.
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MARTIN: OK, let’s read it.
LAMOTT: It’s like, there came a day when – I don’t know.
MARTIN: (Reading) And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
LAMOTT: Yeah.
MARTIN: That’s lovely.
CHANG: And you can watch the full conversation with Anne Lamott on YouTube by searching for @NPRWildCard. Her new book, “Good Writing,” is out now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SUMMER WALKER SONG, “FMT”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
