Summary
I figure with my own nonfiction it's about 85/15. The difference with my stories is that nothing really happens in them, I mean it's always the same story: I wake up feeling funky or vaguely mentally ill and OCO and all my problems and my mental chaos, they're all sitting on the bed waiting for me to get up because they're bored and want coffee. So it's me and my mental processes and I get up and it turns out that [George Bush] is still president and then something bad happens to me or someone I love. Then you overreact and struggle and it breaks your heart and then you let go a little bit and your sense of humor comes back or somebody says something lovely or spiritually true and I'm restored to having some sort of balance. Or [Sam]'s in a bad mood and he's mean to me and I realize I'm the world's worst mother and it's all hopeless and he's going to be a serial killer and then the plates of the earth shift and Sam's back to lovely and dear and humane and we kinda lurch along like Samuel Beckett characters and that is what almost all my stories are about: they're like slow Crockpot meals of forgiveness and that's why the book's called Grace (Eventually). So there is never anything all that interesting for people to go, "Oh, she made that up."
Plan B was obviously a much angrier book partly because Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were much more powerful and the war was just beginning when I wrote some of those pieces, and felt so angry and so ripped off, but I also felt a missionary obligation to help people keep their spirits up. And then there came a point when I got sick and tired of being sick and tired every morning at the whole lot of them, and I started to think that my hostility towards them was part of the problem. The solution is always love and the solution is always nonviolence. Gandhi was right 100 percent of the time. I thought it was right that we kept protesting and rallying and at the same time I thought: I'm not any better than they are, so I started going up to altar call at the end of church for a special prayer where you can go if you're feeling particularly nuts or sick, or someone you love has just been diagnosed with something horrible. I was so mentally stressed and I was guilty of thinking that God was, if not a Democrat, then just horrified by the civilian casualties on both sides of that awful, stupid, disaster of a war. But I would just go up to Veronica, my pastor, and I would say, "I'm so crazy, I'm so ugly, when I think about Bush I feel like it's made me mentally ill"-and she never once tried to correct me, or say "you have to do better" or "Jesus insisted we love our enemies, get over this." She never judged, she'd whisper, "It's so good you've brought this to us" and then she'd say to the congregation, "Annie's mind is all riled up and she's seeking to be a peacemaker." So I went up for a long time and it got better. I can genuinely say there was spiritual healing. Then many, many months later we had the midterms-and I have to say that with the exception of four or five days, I've been in a good mood ever since. [laughter]The funny thing is, for the last few months I kind of like everybody and I don't remember the last time I felt that way. I'm very thrilled to be from the same area as Nancy Pelosi. She's like one of the old ward bosses, a tried and true politician, and she understands the game, that it's about compromise, so I love her. I am least enthusiastic about Hillary, because she's been such a hawk on the war and because she's been so mealy-mouthed about women's rights and abortion rights. She keeps trying to play it to the center, instead of coming out and saying, "You know what? It's the law" that women have the right to a safe and legal abortion. But I'm coming around, you know, she's so smart and so efficient-she's been a terrific senator. I mean, when did this highly competent efficiency come to be mocked? I think maybe after George Bush's reign we're all longing for somebody who's highly competent, overeducated, overprcpared. I really love Al Gore, I'm secretly for Al Gore right now. Who knows whether he'll run. I do know he's losing a little bit of weight and that you can go by that. I like John Edwards very much and I like Barack very much, but I just think that at this time in America's history, this is when we most need FDR, we need Lincoln, we need a brilliant, compassionate, wise leader and I'm not convinced right now that Barack has that, but I like him very much. You know, the single most precious gift America's given to civilization is the separation between church and state, and we need to have that re-established, and I feel like we need an elder statesman.See the full content of this document
Extract
Keeping the Faith
Since the publication of her first novel, HardLaughter, in 1980, Anne Lamott has become a much loved member of the Marin family. A prolific writer and county native, she is best known for Operating Instructions, an account of her experiences as a single mother to baby Sam; Bird by Bird, a guide for writers; and three books of essays on faith-Traveling Mercies, Plan B and the newly published Grace (Eventually). Lamott is a regular on the major bestseller lists, her popularity stemming from her ability to construct prose that is honest, courageous and wildly funny. Like Joan of Arc without the visions (she became a practicing Christian around the time she got sober, over 20 years ago, and is a committed member of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Marin City), she rides out to take aim at injustice, cruelty and the Bush administration-though she'd take issue with that image, being just as committed to ...
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