Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

by Anne Lamott

  She said, "Are you a singer?" and I felt the jungle drums start to beat, warning me to keep my mouth shut, warning me to send my ego to its room. But I had gotten used to the attention. I cleared my throat and toed the carpet and said, "No, I’m a writer."

  She said, "Oh, wow! I read absolutely everything. Tell me your name."

  I knew I was in trouble. I knew I was going to get nailed, but my ego had become Nelson Rockefeller, and it felt like mingling. My wiser self knew I was already too far in to stop now. I said, "No, no, you won’t have heard of me, and it’ll make me feel terrible."

  She stood firm. "Honest," she said, "I read everything." Part of me believed I had become so famous that when I told her my name, she’d react as if Paul McCartney had just dropped into her store. The wiser part of me knew I was a goner for sure. I started to pray at that point, only I was praying to her: please, please don’t make me tell you my name. I smiled demurely, like we’d had our fun and I’d better go get Sam, who was hiding under a rack of dresses making rude noises.

  "Beth, Beth," the shop owner called out suddenly. "Come here!" A young woman stepped out from the back room with an expectant look on her face. "Beth," the owner said, "don’t I read everything? Tell her!" Beth said yes, yes, this is true, she reads everything. Then the owner looked at me kindly, and said, "Now come on, what’s your name?"

  I sighed, smiled, and finally said, "Anne Lamott." She stared at me with great concern. The room was very quiet, except for Sam under the dress rack. Then she pursed her lips and slowly shook her head. "No," she said. "I guess not."

  It took me about a week and a great deal of cheap chocolate to get over that. But then I remembered that whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware. The cosmic banana peel is suddenly going to appear underfoot to make sure you don’t take it all too seriously, that you don’t fill up on junk food.

  All that I know about the relationship between publication and mental health was summed up in one line of the movie Cool Runnings, which is about the first Jamaican bobsled team. The coach is a four-hundred-pound man who had won a gold in Olympic bobsledding twenty years before but has been a complete loser ever since. The men on his team are desperate to win an Olympic medal, just as half the people in my classes are desperate to get published. But the coach says, "If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it." You may want to tape this to the wall near your desk.

  The banana peel has appeared almost every time I’ve scored a triumph, or what the world would regard as a triumph. It’s God as coyote prankster. Just last week, for instance, I was participating in this illustrious literary event in San Francisco for a national charity. I had waited for years to be included in this event, each year watching six other writers be selected. I had tried to be a good sport about it, God knows I had. I understood that the organizers needed to invite big-time, nationally known writers so as to draw the biggest possible crowd; this made perfect sense. But year after year I felt dejected each time I was not included. Finally this year I was asked, and my joy was boundless. Now, I’m not stupid: I knew it was a nice big plate of cocaine for my ego. I knew it was another golden calf. But still my baby heart soared like an eagle.

  However. There was this one tiny little problem. I was the last author to be asked and to commit, so I wasn’t on the initial press release that went out three months ago. The publicity chairwoman sent out a second release after I came on board. But when the first big prominent mention was made in the paper a few weeks ago, my name wasn’t included. I was miffed, since it was the most important column in the paper, but I am old and tough and can handle this sort of disappointment. Next there was a paragraph about the event in the book section, and once again I was not included. This time the publicity chairwoman called, upset and so full of apologies that she managed to mollify me. Then there was a big mention in the society pages, and guess what? It felt like seventh grade all over again. The publicity chairwoman called again and was so upset that I thought she might actually drink a big glass of Drano right there on the phone. I felt suddenly so teary and premenstrual and left out that I couldn’t even talk about it. Hours later, I remembered that if I wasn’t enough before being asked to participate in this prestigious event, then participating wasn’t going to make me enough. Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.

  Also, about an hour after I had slogged through to this conclusion, my mouth dropped open. I had somehow forgotten that it was a charity event! I had come to see it as a sort of showcase. For me.

  Funny how that happens. I finally smiled, remembering something I heard Ram Dass say on the radio once, about somebodyism—how most of us are raised to be somebodies and what a no-win game that is to buy into, because while you may turn out to be much more somebody than somebody else, a lot of other people are going to be a lot more somebody than you. And you are going to drive yourself crazy.

  One more thing about publication: when this book of mine came out, the one that did pretty well, the one that necessitated the buying of a new dress, I found myself stoned on all the attention, and then lost and derailed, needing a new fix every couple of days and otherwise going into withdrawal. My insides became completely uninhabitable, as if I’d wandered into a penny arcade with lots of bells ringing and lights flashing and lots of junk food, and I’d been there too long. I wanted peace, peace and quiet, but at the same time I didn’t want to leave. I was like one of the bad boys in "Pinocchio" who flock to the island of pleasure and grow donkey ears. I knew my soul was sick and that I needed spiritual advice, and I knew also that this advice shouldn’t be terribly sophisticated. So I went to see the pastor of my son’s preschool.

  The pastor is about fifteen. We talked for a while. It turns out he just looks young. I said that I was all over the place, up and down, scattered, high, withdrawing, lost, and in the midst of it all trying to find some elusive sense of serenity. "The world can’t give that serenity," he said. "The world can’t give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts."

  "I hate that," I said.

  "I know. But the good news is that by the same token, the world can’t take it away."

  Part Five

  The Last Class

  There are so many things I want to tell my students in our last class, so many things I want to remind them of. Write about your childhoods, I tell them for the umpteenth time. Write about that time in your life when you were so intensely interested in the world, when your powers of observation were at their most acute, when you felt things so deeply. Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion.

  Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

  Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

  If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

  Ethan Canin insists that you should never write out of vengeance, while I tell my students that they should always write out of
vengeance, as long as they do so nicely. If someone has crossed them, if someone has treated them too roughly, I urge them to write about it. Two of my students, in different sessions, decided to write about the switches that their parents selected from backyard trees and with which their parents used to beat them. Use these memories, I told them. They are yours. This should not have happened to you. Personally, I would write about this partly out of a longing to make sense of it all and partly out of vengeance. And this, I tell my students, may be as good a time as any to discuss libel.

  Libel is defamation by written or printed word. It is knowingly, maliciously saying things about people that cast them in a false or damaging light. This means that if you lived with a man who had a number of curious personal and professional habits and circumstances that his friends and clients happen to know about, and if these friends can identify this man in your work by these habits and circumstances, you should probably change the details dramatically. If he was famous for having long toenails, make them nasal hairs instead. If he dyed his hair black, have him use foundation instead and maybe the merest hint of blusher. However, if he revealed himself through his actions toward you to be a sociopathic narcissist, you can attempt to capture his character and use actual conversations, just as long as this specific man is not identifiable by your descriptions. Change everything that would point to him specifically. Leave out his kleptomaniac leanings. Leave out the kind of car he really drove and the fact that he hated smokers so much that he planted a tiny tree in the ashtray. Make yourself the first wife or the girlfriend, instead of the third wife, and do not include his offensive children, especially the red-haired twins. If you disguise this person carefully so that he cannot be recognized by the physical or professional facts of his life, you can use him in your work. And the best advice I can give you is to give him a teenie little penis so he will be less likely to come forth.

  I know this makes me sound a little angry.

  I had a student whose mother, as punishment, used to burn him on the stove in the kitchen when he was little. "Use it," I told him.

  "She’s old, though," he said. "Her life has not been a happy one. "

  My heart bleeds, I told him. Change her looks, age, where you lived. If you were an only child, make up five other kids. If there were three kids in your family, have the narrator be an only child. Make her a single mother. Use the bad dad somewhere else, in another story. If there was no dad, make one up.

  This guy has written some beautiful stories about his childhood, with a mother who physically bears absolutely no resemblance to his own. She now has blond hair and big warm brown eyes, worked at the A & P—and held her son’s hand to the flame when he was naughty. One time when he finished reading, the class burst into spontaneous applause.

  A friend of mine recently fell for this non-Catholic priest who seemed very learned and spiritual and tender in the beginning, and then turned out to be a mean little Napoleonic shit; not to put too fine a point on it. She wondered if she could use him as a character.

  Oh, I said, I insist.

  "Do I have to make him tall, so he won’t sue me?"

  "No, no, no," I said. Make him an uneducated writer, instead of a psychologist. Give him a past, two wives, and a number of kids he hasn’t seen in years. Make him homely, make him a smoker, make him an atheist.

  Give him a penis that looks like a tiny little egg in a bird’s nest. He isn’t going to come forward.

  Maybe this is not only vengeance; maybe it is just wanting to tell the truth as it really happened. Maybe it is also about trying to find some meaning in the suffering. Well. Whatever. Here is a poem by Sharon Olds, called "I Go Back to May 1937," that I pass out to every class:

  I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

  I see my father strolling out

  under the ochre sandstone arch, the

  red tiles glinting like bent

  plates of blood behind his head, I

  see my mother with a few light books at her hip

  standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the

  wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

  sword-tips black in the May air,

  they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

  they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

  innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

  I want to go up to them and say Stop,

  don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

  he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

  you cannot imagine you would ever do,

  you are going to do bad things to children,

  you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,

  you are going to want to die. I want to go

  up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

  her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,

  her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

  his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,

  his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

  but I don’t do it. I want to live. I

  take them up like the male and female

  paper dolls and bang them together

  at the hips like chips of flint as if to

  strike sparks from them, I say

  Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

  I know that if you write a novel about your marriage, and your spouse is a public figure—a politician, say, or a therapist—and you say really awful inflammatory things about this person, all of which may be true, including the part about his wearing the little French maid’s outfit when you made love and that awful business with the Brylcreem, you will get a visit from your publisher’s lawyer, who will be very anxious and unamused. The problem is that the publishing house will be liable for millions of dollars in damages if this spouse of yours can convince a jury that he or she has been libeled. The best solution is not only to disguise and change as many characteristics as you can but also to make the fictional person a composite. Then throw in the teenie little penis and anti-Semitic leanings, and I think you’ll be Okay.

  Try not to feel sorry for yourselves, I say, when you find the going hard and lonely. You seem to want to write, so write. You didn’t have to sign up for this class. I didn’t chase you down and drag you by the hair back to my cave. You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

  Now there is only a little time left in the class, and it feels like that last half hour at camp when you’ve all gathered in the parking lot, waiting for your duffel bags to be loaded on the bus.

  I think I’ve told my students every single thing I know about writing. Short assignments, shitty first drafts, one-inch picture frames, Polaroids, messes, mistakes, partners. But a lot of these people came to my class with the best ten pages they’ve ever written, hoping to get published, and now they wonder if this was just a pipe dream. I don’t think so. Maybe most of them are not going to be published in big magazines or by big presses. They are not going to end up on talk shows and best-seller lists, are not going to be David Letterman’s best friend or show Sharon Stone a good time. They are not going to buy big houses and pedigreed dogs and fish forks as a result of their writing. Many of them want these things more than anything else. They don’t believe that if they got these things they’d probably end up even more mentally ill and full of stress and self-doubt than t
hey already are. Anyway, it is not going to happen for very many of them.

  I still think they should write with everything they have, daily if possible, and for the rest of their lives.

  When I suggest, however, that devotion and commitment will be their own reward, that in dedication to their craft they will find solace and direction and wisdom and truth and pride, they at first look at me with great hostility. You might think that I had just offered them membership in my embroidery club. They are angry people. This is why they write.

  So let me go further. There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal. It is spiritually invigorating, says a friend, who converted at eighteen from Christianity to poetry. It is intellectually quickening. One can find in writing a perfect focus for life. It offers challenge and delight and agony and commitment. We see our work as a vocation, with the potential to be as rich and enlivening as the priesthood. As a writer, one will have over the years many experiences that stimulate and nourish the spirit. These will be quiet and deep inside, however, unaccompanied by thunder or tremulous angels. My friend Tom, the gay Jesuit priest, said that he has longed for spiritual experiences all his life but that when he was drinking, he longed specifically to go into a church and have the statue of Mary wave back at him. And sometimes it did, when he was drinking—just quick little waves and then she’d sit down. But after he got sober, he could tell he’d had a genuine experience when he’d feel a sense of liberation afterward, in his chest, his lungs, his soul. This feeling is something my students report, especially those in writing groups, this feeling of liberation that, ironically, discipline brings.

  Becoming a writer can also profoundly change your life as a reader. One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration, knowing now how hard writing is, especially how hard it is to make it look effortless. You begin to read with a writer’s eyes. You focus in a new way. You study how someone portrays his or her version of things in a way that is new and bold and original. You notice how a writer paints in a mesmerizing character or era for you, without your having the sense of being given a whole lot of information, and when you realize how artfully this has happened, you may actually put the book down for a moment and savor it, just taste it.