When did you have your first drink, Annie?

Well, I'd ha- we had sips because my parents were both...

My, my mother was from England, and my father was just very, very hip, slick, and cool, and jazz-oriented.

So it was believed that you could give children sips of things so they could test beer or wine and, and therefore be more, um, superior to other children in WASPier families.

But I remember chugging a beer, a 16-ounce Coors, when I was 12 years old, so it would've been '66, with my best friend, Lisa Kampmeier, and I felt hope bloom [laughs] in my chest.

I could breathe again.

But I remember that first beer, and I remember thinking, "I'm good." [laughs] And then I believe I also had a predisposition.

Oh, geez.

For people who maybe haven't read along in that journey, tell us about when and how that started, your addiction, and when it started to heal.

I think I just came this way, you know.

I think I just had and have a very addictive personality.

I can remember being on rope swings with my girlfriends when I was really young, swinging, you know, spinning around, spinning around.

And the girls would stop before they got dizzy, and I would want to keep going.

And I would love to get off that rope swing and then stagger around drunkenly.

And then, as I said, I was, you know, I was shy and I was very bullied.

Uh, it's a dream about your father's girlfriend, and it's, it's intense, but I wonder, could you read us that story?

Okay.

Okay.

"But turning 68 means you weren't born yesterday.

Turning 68 means you've seen what you've seen, Ukraine, Sandy Hook, the permafrost, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

By 68 you have seen dear friends literally ravaged by cancer, lost children, unspeakable losses.

The midterms are coming up.

My mind is slipping.

Hmm.

You know, how do you work with yourself to stay on the more intrinsic motivations versus getting sort of really focused on the extrinsic pieces of it?

it?That's a good question.

As I wrote a lot in Bird by Bird, when you're a writer, you get fixated on the outside validation, and you believe before you're published that it will completely affirm you and validate your parking ticket, and it will last, and it won't.

It's just a fix.

It's mood-altering, and I love it.

Don't get me wrong.

But I get many, many, many bad reviews also.

Yeah.

What's something you thought about yourself that you had to unlearn?

I had to unlearn...

I mean, my parents taught me great values.

They were civil rights activists.

We were marching against Vietnam early on and marching for, you know, just all the great good causes.

Um, and they taught me to read.

I was reading very early.

Is there a religious practice or ritual that you're envious of?

It is not for the faint of heart, and if we can make it a little simpler, amen.

amen.Hi, my name is Anne Lamott.

I'm the author of 21 books.

The last one was called Good Writing, which I wrote with my husband, Neil Allen.

At the age of 60, 12 years ago, I woke up feeling a heaviness on my chest, a cellular understanding of how much I had been carrying all these decades that were things my parents had told me about myself that were simply not true.

My parents were very progressive, but they started seeing me for my achievements at five or six instead of for the goofy, loving being that we are all underneath the surface.

When I decided on the right to be who I truly was instead of the person I had always agreed and striven to be, i.e., highly successful, endlessly charming, life got a lot more simple.

As a reader?

Yes, in a bookstore that I'm auditioning.

Usually it's because I've been reading good reviews about it, although there are almost no reviews anywhere anymore.

But if you look around, um, or somebody's told me that they loved it, and I'll pick it up, and I'll read the first few pages, and I will be looking for somebody that is using, that is writing really nice sentences.

You know, M.F.K. Fisher, the, probably the world's greatest food writer, said, "What you're doing as, as a, as a writer is writing one clean, fresh sentence and putting a period at the end of it." And so I'll start to read, and I'll see if the, the, if these sentences are pleasing to me, and I'll read a little bit more, and I'll see.

I'll just start noticing, oh, I like this.

I wanna get to the bottom of this paragraph.

How do you feel like movies have informed the way that you tell stories?

Mm-hmm.

So you wanna take out anything that hints at existential dread.

And, um, and but then finally, at some point, ugh, you just think, "I don't have the time.

I don't have the time to keep trying to get myself to sound like I'm somebody different than I am.

I'm just gonna see what it might be like if I just write what, what is inside me that wants to get written." But also, another thing in good writing that I think is important...

I've been getting over a, like a two-week cold, so I'm a little horsey.

But, um, I don't think writers, uh, not grant writers or writers, people writing to their edi- their, um, boss, you don't know how much help is available, and how much you can ask for people to read your stuff for you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So Duncan, let me answer your question, um, th- that was really profound, um, in a, a specific thing that happened on, uh, Saturday morning.

Saturday morning I was in New Orleans to speak to this wonderful do-gooder group called Keep America Beautiful, who plant trees and flowers in the neighborhood, and they pick up litter.

And there's like a million volunteers.

There's a thousand franchises around the country.

I was the keynote speaker at 9:00 in the morning.

So I wake up at 7:00, which is 5:00 California time, and I, I start to get little flickers that Iran is back in the news, and I think it's just the saber-rattling.

Please, sorry.

So who would you like to shout out today?

Well, I would like to give a shout-out to the other mother in my childhood.

In the fifties and sixties, all girls had an other mother, right? You had your mother-mother, who had a lot of thoughts and worries about you and a lot of issues concerning you, uh, some of which had to do with disappointment [laughs] or...

And the other mother, your best friend's mother, just thought you were fabulous.

So I wanna talk about, uh, Lee Adams, who was the mother of my best friend, Shelly Adams, from six years old.

I still walk with Shelly Adams two or three times a week, so this is sixty, uh, six years later, we're still walking.

But Lee-- See, my parents were atheists, and they were very devout atheists, and they just thought Christians were a mortification upon the land, but they had a list of who were the worst of those.

Did your mother have any relationship with Lee?

Mm-hmm.

... somehow the, Thoughts on Love, a lot about the really pretzelizing, um, disease of perfectionism that a lot of us were raised by, and that you really need to do things right, or you're flooded with shame, you know? And we call shame, um, the acronym is should, have, already, mastered everything.

Well, how could you have, you know? You're young, you're much younger than I am, and I'm a very young old woman, and, um, how am I gonna have...

You know, I'm human and, and what I'm here to do is to step into that shape of being fully human that was always waiting for me.

But the perfectionism kept me from that, and kept me th- thinking I needed to do things better, i.e. to forgive more perfectly.

Well, you've read a lot of my books, and it's the hardest work we do.

Like, the radical self-love and, and acceptance, comma, and the breaking through the perfectionism and allowing ourselves to do things the best we can on any given day, which was not how it was in my family.

(laughs).

I'd like to play actually some of the advice that you put into that book that you also shared in your TED Talk about the act of writing.

If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it.

If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

[laughs] You're going to feel like hell if you wake up some day and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart, your stories, memories, visions, and songs, your truth, your version of things in your own voice.

That's really all you have to offer us.

Publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from.

They kill as many people as not.

Uh, it's a dream about your father's girlfriend, and it's, it's intense, but I wonder, could you read us that story?