you own everything that happened to you*

My Conversation with Anne Lamott about Permission

Here was my introduction to Anne Lamott:

It was 1997, and I was a senior editor at HarperCollins. I was the newly anointed house editor of LGBTQ-themed narratives; I myself had just come out, in a loving family of such extreme perfection that we all but squeaked in our flawlessness. My beloved stepfather had died suddenly one freezing January night, after suffering from a massive brain hemorrhage following days of confusion misdiagnosed by his doctor as clinical depression, and by my mother as an allergy to the shrimp in lobster sauce he’d had a few nights earlier.

My boss — we were (and are still) friends and, like everyone else at the company straight or gay, I had the tiniest crush on her — had been laid off. (She’s probably reading this; oh well.) My workload doubled overnight. My financial state was deplorable. I had just written my first essay for publication, about my late maternal grandmother being a lesbian in a sixty-year relationship with a woman and married to a man involved with a local nun named Sister Redempta. I had just been diagnosed with a heart condition usually associated with heavy cocaine use (I have never used it) or extreme stress. I had written and workshopped my first short story but couldn’t submit it for publication as my teacher, Jenifer Levin, suggested I do, because it implicated a much-loved childhood neighbor in mind-numbing sexual misconduct; just finishing it sent me into paroxysms of shame. I was playing competitive squash three times a week, throwing regular and overwrought dinner parties, drinking white wine by the gallon, and coming home from work most days to find my mother waiting for me in my apartment building lobby — often for hours — so she’d have someone to fight with. Her lifelong borderline and bipolar diagnoses were not yet official, and I had suddenly become her financial and emotional spousal replacement.

I had reached the point where my own personal bucket couldn’t possibly hold any more without overflowing. And one afternoon, while I was sitting in my office with the door closed and eating my tuna salad, I found myself reading a Salon essay by Anne Lamott called Traveling Mercies. I knew her work — mostly her fiction, although I had a copy of Bird By Bird on my bookshelf, along with Operating Instructions — and I thought of her writing as being sort of the literary equivalent of the Chuckles the Clown episode on the old Mary Tyler Moore show: it could make you laugh until you couldn’t possibly form words, and then weep uncontrollably, often within minutes of each other.

Traveling Mercies is an essay that I still carry around with me, not because of its Jesus connotations, but because it allowed me to breathe again after years of emotional hypoxia. The short version: it was about what happens when everything you think could possibly go wrong goes wrong, and how the most unexpected meetings can turn everything around on a dime, and give you hope. It landed in my life exactly when it needed to — when I needed it to — and it began my long-term love affair with Anne’s work, which I re-read every year in a kind of ring cycle of generous wisdom that saves my ass, every single time. And if you would have told me in 1997 that I’d be in conversation with Anne about a book I’d written, I’d have told you you were crazy. But here we are.

When I started writing Permission, I kept coming across Anne’s quote from Bird By Bird: you own everything that happened to you. This is the question at the core of Permission: do you…really? Are there gray areas? How do you know what they are, and how do you work with them?

How do you write the thing that you have to write — that defines you and your worldview — when you’ve been warned against it?

For free subscribers, I am including an eighteen-minute segment of our conversation, above. Paid subscribers will have access to the complete conversation, below. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you in my chat and, hopefully, in person.