Two week ago I had a dream about Anne Lamott. In my dream she was mousy and kind of boring looking, with a dull brown hairdo (no dreads.) I think that in dreamland I got Mary Oliver’s hairstyle mixed up with Anne’s. Any how, in my dream Anne was doing Q&A at a reading, and everyone was raising their hands and jumping up and down holding her books over thier heads in hope of gaining an autograph. I thought all the questions were really insipid, and was patiently waiting in the back row for Anne to acknowledge me so I could ask her my obviously brilliant and insightful question.

Being short and in the back row, this never actually happened.

After the reading, my friend and I went out to dinner and Anne and her publisher were sitting at a bistro table right next to us. I thought, ‘Hey! I could call Jen (Lemen) tomorrow and tell her I had dinner with Anne Lamott. (heh, heh, heh!)”

On the way out of the restaurant Anne stopped me and said, “I saw you at the reading and I know you had a question. Would you like to ask me your question now?”

So I said, “Umm. Sure. I was wondering if you could tell me how I might take my webpage writings and turn them in to a book — like you did with Traveling Mercies.”

Anne said, “What do you mean?! I guess you just sit down and do it.”
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Fast forward to this week, when I actually did get to go one of Anne’s readings at 1st Baptist in Seattle. She’s promoting the paperback release of Plan B and more than one woman at Monkfish Abbey insisted that I get my butt in gear and head downtown to hear the high priestess herself. I was standing in the aisle, chatting with some friends and said, “Yeah, at Monkfish Anne is as close as we come to having a Pope.” Just then the whole room started to applaud, and I realized Anne was passing directly behind me on her way to the podium. (Hello. Feeling like a geek here…)

Gratefully, Anne as neither mousy nor boring and still has her trademark dreadlocks, currently bleached a yellow blond. She did however, wear a surprisingly tame pastel pink cardigan and a simple pair of jeans, which just made me love her all the more.

Anne read a bit from Plan B. She said something like, “I don’t really know why people keep reading me. All my stories are the same. I wake up, and I’m grumpy, and all my mental illnesses are waiting at the foot of the bed….and they’ve all already had their coffee…..” She chose to read a story about her friend who was dying of cancer. The friend had about a million skin grafts and her legs looked like lizard skin, but as far as Anne was considered she was still beautiful. Anne thinks everyone is beautiful—well, everyone who is nice and possibly not a Republican. If she ever hits a dry spell in her writing she could make a fortune by starting a consulting business where you could call her, say, after a really bad and entirely too expensive haircut — or after the post-partum discovery that twenty-three of those thirty pounds were not actually baby. When you called, Anne would describe to you why you are incredibly beautiful– yes you with that modified mullet, or you with the baby spit stains all the way down your back– and you would believe it.

After reading, Anne took Q&A. Rebecca urged me to raise my hand and ask my dream question, and Jen Montzingo was waving her hands around trying to catch the eye of the mic-guy and mouthing “SHE HAS A QUESTION” while pointing to me. I had not one, but two very jangly charm bracelets on, so the gals encouraged me to shake my arm a little each time I raised my hand. Eventually — quite possibly just to get this annoying behavior to stop — the mic-guy let me ask my question. Since my pal Sarah Henderson had just asked a question about dreams, I decided to get in a quick bit of story telling in so I said,

“I had a dream recently where I asked you how to turn my web-writing into a book and you said ‘What do you mean? You just sit down and do it.” (The room starts laughing.) So since I’ve got an answer to that one I’ll ask you this: When you are raising children and have a sixteen year old like Sam, how do you decide which stories are yours to tell and which stories belong to the Wolfpup?”

Anne said, “Well actually I want to answer your first question too….” Then she went on to tell me that there was, in fact, a lot of getting your butt into a chair and working on your writing, but that you also needed lots and lots of help. She said that writing a book is very, very hard and that you must have help to succeed. Then she told us some stories about people who’ve helped her — folks who read her drafts and tell her she’s being “race conscious, or that she should cut the entire first page and just get on with it. I think she might have told me to take whatever help comes, even from unexpected places…but I might have read that in Julia Cameron this week….I’m old, I get confused.

Then Anne said, “Now, regarding the Wolfpup…” This totally thrilled me, because she liked my pet-phrase enough to use it in a sentence. I got all giddy! Anyway, Anne said she tries to write things that Sam would be thrilled to read. “Thankfully, he doesn’t read all that much…” She also said she never writes about his body, or his relationships. She suggested writing stories in which, as a parent, you look very very bad – because you’re kids will love that. “Now grown-ups are a different story,” said Anne. “Just write about them. If they wanted you to write something nicer, they should have behaved better.” She also said that ultimately everything that happens to you is yours, and you’ll know instinctively whether you should share it or not.

So that was my thrilling night with Anne Lamott, high priestess and first female Pope of the People. Aren’t you ever so jealous?