Thoughts on Love (with author Anne Lamott)

0:03Don't hold anything too tightly. Just wish for it, want it, let it come from the intention of real truth for you and then let it go. For me, our soul is like it's unbound. It's limitless. But we will use words to limit ourselves. When people stop believing that somebody's got your back or Superman's coming, we turn to ourselves. And that's where you become empowered. Courageous participation attracts positive things. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow, and this is the Goop Podcast, where we bring together visionaries, scientists, healers, artists, and seekers. I'm so grateful that I get to interview these extraordinary thought leaders and share their wisdom with you.

0:51And I love listening to the conversations that are led by my co-host and dear friend, Cleo Wade. Cleo is a beautiful poet and author. I deeply admire her and the way she keeps her heart open to the world. Together, we believe that engaging in open-minded, honest, and sometimes difficult conversations has the power to change our lives. All right, over to Cleo. My guest today is Vee Anne Lamont, who I love so much and I am so inspired by. Anne is the best-selling author of many books, including Bird by Bird, Help Things Wow, and Hallelujah Anyway. Her latest book is called Somehow, Thoughts on Love.

1:35It is out today on the eve of her 70th birthday, which I got to ask her all about in this conversation. As I told Anne, I got an early copy of this book and ended up reading it twice. I carried it with me to, I think, four different cities, and it's pretty much been in my bag ever since. I'm so happy that it's finally going to be out in the world for all of you to read. Today, we talk about friendship breakups, the value of crying, recovering from perfectionism, and the importance of practicing self-forgiveness. Okay, let's get to my chat with Anne Lamott.

2:15I want to thank you so much for writing this book, somehow. When I first started doing this podcast last year, Gwyneth asked me who is the person I most wanted to have in the podcast, and I said you. Oh, thank you. I love your work so much. It's the only work, and in a way it feels like poetry to me, but I often say I love poetry so much because you get to visit with poets. And so you can kind of keep them around all the time. I always say that I have poetry books scattered all over my house because when I just want to visit with Nikki Giovanni, I know where to find her. And your books are something I visit with.

2:52I keep them in my bags. I sometimes travel with two books if I'm reading a story and I have yours because I feel so grateful that you put so much of yourself into them so that we can visit with you whenever we like. So thank you so much. Thank you. That's really sweet. I want to talk about you releasing this book on your 70th birthday. Yeah. How are you feeling about that? Are you excited? Is it April 9th? April 10th. April 10th. Publication day for somehow is April 9th, but the actual birthday is April 10th. I know, well, I'm just astonished because I think I'm 57 and your inside self doesn't age.

3:31You know, your inside self is timeless and all the ages we've ever been are held inside of us and all the ages we'll ever be are held inside of us. So, but I definitely like looking at my driver's license, I can see that I'll be 70 years old. So I'm in wonderful shape And that's a blessing. And I'm spiritually really, really plugged in. And that is what saves me. And I have the most amazing girlfriends. And that is the source of my hope and faith. And I love how much you wrote about them in this book. And all of the different rituals you have for kind of tapping into your sanity, if you feel astray.

4:17Do you have any rituals for your birthday? Is there anything you're doing to kind of honor this moment? I feel that ritual was such a big part of this book in different ways, whether it's a walk or, you know, a gathering with friends. Oh, well, I'll be in New York City for my actual birthday and I'll be on a book tour. But I was sort of always famous for having this terrible sweet tooth. so on any occasion birthday publication anything at all sugar plum bumpkin day cakes would arrive and and once the publisher sent a five pound bag of m &ms with my name on it on each m &m but haven't had sugar in over two years now and so i just don't know what people are going to do but i know that my husband will think he'll be with me on book tour and he'll think of something hilarious.

5:10But you know, I do the same thing every day. I wake up, I say my prayers, I fish around for my glasses. And, and then I do a couple of daily readings and spiritual meditation books. And then I get up. When I'm at home, I let the dog out to pee. And when I'm on the road, I sort of putter around and, you know, try to get oriented 3000 miles away. And I usually have a a little bit of jet lag, which does get worse when you're older. But my publisher, Riverhead, they'll just so show off for my birthday. I still have presents from them from 15 years ago all over my house. Wow. I want to talk about your romance with your husband because I loved reading about it.

5:56Because you guys met kind of later and recently, and it's such a beautiful love story. I don't know. I don't want to spoil any of the bits you shared in your book, but for anyone, I feel that so much of what we talk about or people hope for to look forward to is that our lives have many chapters. And I think that so often we feel that, you know, we don't get second and third and fourth or fifth chances on anything, let alone romance. I mean, we even talk about how there's so few films where we're showing romantic leads who are over 35. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about it and share your thoughts on romance.

6:37Yeah, yeah. Well, I met Neil seven and a half years ago. There's a sort of offshoot of match.com for older people called Our Time. And I'd actually rejected him, not rejected him, but just didn't follow up on it because he was allergic to cats. and my cat is sort of my main source of comfort and be ballast here on the earth and and love and so then he came up a few months later and I wrote and I said oh I love your profile and he wrote oh you already rejected me once I think it's because I'm not Jesusy enough and I could care less how Jesusy somebody is and I just said no it was about the cat and he wrote back and said well I found a way to manage my he's severely allergic to cats so but he's found a way with brewer's yeast in the kibble so that it neutralizes the proteins in the saliva and he's not allergic as it turns out we've always lived with cats since we got together so we met and we just gropped each other you know like strangers in a strange land we just got each other on the deepest most intuitive level but more than that I'd always had a dating policy and I've been I've been in long-term relationships and I had had a lot of men in my life but my new boundary was that if I didn't think the man would be my best girlfriend if he were female I didn't want to take it to that next step I was just done with men who were wonderful in whatever ways they were wonderful but who I didn't have that depth of conversation and spirit and intimacy with and I instantly did with Neil and we just started riffing you know and this was important every single book that I'd changed my life had changed his every book I'd read twice or more he'd read twice or more every movie that we'd seen twice over the 50 or 60 years we'd he'd seen twice and we just had that feeling we could talk forever.

8:36Plus, I loved how he looked and he had beautiful hands, really big hands like a doctor. And we have seen each other every single day since then, since August of 2016, unless one of us had to travel out of town without the other. Then we got married. We're coming up on five years in a few days. And I hadn't really cared that much. So many of the women I've loved my whole life never got married. And I didn't mind being one of them. In fact, I kind of thought it spoke well of me. But he asked me one day, we're watching the US Open, and he said, tennis matches, he said, Can I ask you something? I said, Oh, yeah, sure, whatever.

9:16Because I thought we've been talking about the garden pebbles. And I thought it was like, what color garden pebbles? And he said, Will you marry me? And we had our cat had been, we'd lost our cat. And I said, Well, can we get another cat? And he said, Sure. And I said, Okay, then I'll marry you so we got married three days after I started getting social security

9:39and I love it and I'm like a beacon of hope to people who have not had luck either with online dating or with their relationships because what I know is that you don't settle what I know is that what you love and your very very best friend is what you're looking for in a partner. What I know is that the thrill wears off and the fog of love and the energy and the merge completely. And then you're two people who are set in their ways probably, and who have had a lot of disappointments and heartbreaks and some losses that didn't feel like they would be survivable. And yet you came through. And so the question is, now what?

10:24And what we did is because we both have spiritual paths, we just have found our way. We've always been able to sit down, even if we're kind of clenched up, and I'm teary, and just to insist that we talk about it. At Goop, we believe the spaces we spend time in shape how we feel and how we connect. That's why we're drawn to Convene, a global hospitality brand reimagining work in meeting spaces centered around design and care. Convene's sophisticated, purpose-built locations are designed to inspire connection, whether it's a board meeting for 10, a team off-site, or a workplace membership that gives you and your team a home base.

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11:48Yeah, me too. I just, even on my book tours, I always say that they're just a space for friendship. And I kind of borrow from church that everyone has to say hello to their neighbor and they say hi neighbor. And there's so many articles being written about this decline in friendship, or they say that men are having a friendship recession and that it's gotten harder and harder for people to meet. And I find that so heartbreaking. And what's also, I think part of that is it's, I think it's harder for people to meet, but perhaps it's harder to sustain friendships for long periods of time because, you know, you have to have these kind of ways that you agree on conflict resolution.

12:28And, and there's this kind of, there's this part of the book where you're talking about your friendship with your friend, Tim. And, and there's a moment where I'm, I'm feeling like you guys are going to have a friendship breakup. And that is something that, you know, I think culturally we've been talking about so much because people I think now are starting to really value their friendships as much as their romantic relationships because they're outlasting them for the most part. And in that, there's so much of the pain from the breakups that are unspoken. You feel like there's not a space for it.

13:02I was talking to someone on the pod one day about how her and her best friend went to therapy together because she would have done it with her boyfriend. And why wouldn't she do it with this relationship? and there's all these tools we're not really activating for ruptures in these dynamics. And so what are your thoughts on friendship breakups, reconciliation, sustaining friendships? That's a good one. With this friend, the one I talk about in Somehow, God, it's the end of the world. It's just like being eight years old again when your best friend finds somebody else and you just feel like you're going to die and that that was it.

13:46But in this one case, when my friend got angry with me and cut me off and said the most cruel words I could ever hear, which was he didn't want to turn out like me, I just kind of lost my mind briefly. And I thought I went and found Neil and he really helped me through. He writes about the inner critic and he's written a book called Better Days And he talks about this inner critic that we've had since we were little and we needed a voice to tell us not to run out into the street or swim out too far. But it's a voice that constantly shames us and keeps us small and keeps us afraid of trying new things or spreading our wings.

14:26And so I've been doing this work with him for seven and a half years or seven years at the time. And I was reminded that this was my inner critic saying that I'm kind of repellent. right if somebody doesn't want to turn out with me a really trusted old friend so once he reminded me of that I I was better and then that that Tim was my inner critic right then and it was an old familiar voice on the jukebox and so then I I at least knew what the challenge was and that was to do the deep dive into my own self and soul so I could find this radical self love and acceptance, even though somebody had criticized me.

15:10And one thing, I'm not sure if this is true for you, but when somebody criticizes me, or even if I get a bad review, I mean, you and I are so in the wrong business because you're so sensitive. But I think that they're right. You know, my default response is that they're right and that they alone can see me on the inside and that my adorable persona in fraudulent ways have tricked them until finally the veil drops and they can see that, you know, my writing or my personality or my spirit, my beingness are flawed and unacceptable. So once I had that to deal with, I kind, you know, I have some tools in the tool belt and they have to do with shit calling my best friend and saying I hate everything and I'm a bad disgusting person and and and she always that you know your friends always say the magic or they say oh me too you know I was there on Monday and what look and they say look why don't I come get you and we'll go to target yeah and that's the medicine and them loving you and just sharing that they've been there too and what worked was cup of tea a little drive a little shopping and a little time and so the story and somehow is about the two or three days it took to come through and to heal that breach in my sense of love toward in respect of myself and a hundred percent of the time maybe let's say 93 percent of the time when you break through to that to that core of having been loved and being a person of love, the person comes back.

16:54Yeah. And they call you and they get that something went on that was outside of your personality and that had something to do that triggered something deep in them. In recovery, we say if it's hysterical, it's historical. And then you can both go back into that age where someone else, possibly your parent, first made you feel that way, right? And then you can do the healing from there. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. I was talking to this amazing child psychologist recently, and she had written in her book that so much of why parents need to take a moment to kind of collect themselves is because our children have this ability to, and I love this phrase, borrow our nervous systems.

17:41Oh, I love that. Yeah. And I thought about that in terms of, I have two children, but I thought about that in terms of friendship, because we all know that when we get kind of feeling just out of touch with our fundamental okayness, we actually call the person I feel whose nervous system we need to borrow because we have reverted to the child who's feels that, you know, you're every bad thing. and I felt that when you called Connie I find her to be the nervous system you turn to to help regulate yours and I loved that so much well one thing also that without borrowing nervous systems all we have in crisis or attack is fight flight freeze and then the fourth one which is mine is or fawn yeah and as a woman as a girl raised in the 50s and 60s that's what you learn to do is to fawn and to win them back winning them back meant giving up something of yourself or groveling you know and coming from a place of fear and so to borrow someone's central nervous systems means you don't have to do any of those four you just need to get into your heart cave and breathe and and remember love and and do the the inside job of tending to the garden of yourself that of course we screw up.

19:05We're humans. We're going to, we make mistakes. We've made terrible mistakes as parents and we'll make more, you know, and, but it's, it's for me, the way that I was raised was it was life or death to make a mistake, you know, and it's not, Neil is adamant that you get to make mistakes and that mistakes are the fertile feel for all artists. And I think it's probably true for all people. Yeah. Well, there's in that story, you say that Tim had triggered the most universal fear that once you really know us, we are not lovable. And I found that it was also so much of that story was once you were felt lovable.

19:45And then I think everything is an energy in the sense of it's almost like when you're, when you were able to return your love to yourself, he was, I felt that there was some type of energetic frequency that he was all of a sudden able to, you know, or attracted to coming back to you in a way to, to, to discuss. Do you feel that when you were kind of getting into your, and sorry, and that was about Tim, but to switch gears, do you feel that with Neil, did, you know, those, did you have those feelings or do you ever even have this with your girlfriends that you meet? Because we all have that feeling of when we meet someone and we really like them.

20:20So we really want them to like us. And then we're kind of afraid. Do you have those moments of insecurity with your, the people who are close to you, specifically Neil of like, is he going to see this? And then, you know, because I feel you're so good at being honest about those things. And most of us, we just want to live in what clicked with the person and be like, yeah, that's just that. Yeah. Well, I think the whole book is kind of an answer to that a little bit because the line you read really sums up so much about the work here is to come into love with ourselves. And this earth is forgiveness school.

20:55And we eventually forgive everybody or almost everybody. And then we still have this hardness sometimes in our hearts of where we don't quite forgive ourselves for ambitiousness, say, or how judgmental we are. I'm sure you're fine. How judgmental I am or how, you know, hypocritical we are. There's a beautiful practice in the recovery movement, which is to see the word intimacy as into me, I see. I'm sure you've come upon that before. And when you're seeing into yourself, it's not your loveliest aspects, like I'm not avoiding my generosity. I have a really sweet heart, and I'm really generous, and I'm a good listener.

21:36I'm not avoiding those things. I'm avoiding those shadow things that are part of all human life as far as I have been able to determine. And so when somebody has kind of pushed me into a corner and I have to do that deep dive into into me, I see that's where the healing begins. Because once I forgive me and love me, then I don't need to get the other person to come back or to talk about me in a better way or to not bear false witness against me. You know, once I'm providing me with that, then I can release them. And you know what happens for people when you do that radical self love and acceptance, it stopped chasing after them metaphorically, they hear that there's no one chasing them.

22:22And that's an awful feeling of abandonment, right? And we're all in the same boat, we all fear intimacy, we all fear abandonment. And once they're not being chased, why not walk back a little ways and then a little ways more and then maybe all the way back to where you can sit and cry together and talk about it and say I'm really angry that really hurt yeah and they can say wow I can't believe I actually did that and I think what what prompted me was my lifelong fear of or something you've done sometimes that I've never brought up before but maybe we can talk, you know, they come back and we meet halfway.

23:03I had a friend once who I said, I asked her how she practiced or what her kind of self-care, self-love kind of practice was. And she said, the only thing I turned to is self-forgiveness. She said, because I find that if I can forgive myself for who I was five minutes ago or five years ago or 15 years ago, love is possible. And I have a, my probably the most simple mantra I use in my life when I'm kind of reckoning with, you know, who I am and don't want to be, but am anyway. Yeah. I always say, okay. And because I, I feel that I can affirm it's okay. And then, and there's something more, there's something next.

23:40Are there any things that you kind of, are there conversations you have with yourself and practices beyond? I think I love how much you kind of put walking into your life? Because I know that for me, it so helps me just kind of get into my body, almost like I'm trying to sink everything because I don't want to stay in my head and I need kind of my spirit to kind of flow through everything. And I need to just, I feel that I can align and find some type of through line if I can get my body moving. But is there anything that, you know, are you on a walk? Are there prayers you say to yourself? Are there things you do towards forgiveness, self-forgiveness, especially?

24:19Yeah, well, my mantra is that figure it out is not a good slogan. I was raised by intellectual atheists, and that's what we worshipped was intellectual prowess and the East Coast literati. And so first, I remember that figure it out is not a good slogan. Then I remember something, it's another mantra that what Ram Dass said is that we're loving awareness and everything else is just kind of like jackets and gloves and belts we wear our personality stuff but that inside we're loving awareness so I have an ID bracelet so I can remember who I really am which is loving awareness and then I remember left foot right foot left foot breathe and then once I start doing a little breath work it's it's hard to it's hard to stay in a cold, hard place with myself because the breath is connecting me umbilically to the sky and to the earth and to the divine and to the neighbors.

25:21And then eventually to me, to my own sometimes disappointing or kind of flawed and deeply human self. I hear this question a lot, which is people will say, you know, how'd you get to loving yourself? And as if it's a switch that flips on and off as if you're like, Oh, and then I was stumbling around in the dark. And then I was able to find this switch and I flipped it. And what I so admire about your, all of your writing and so much in this book, especially because it's such a, you know, beautiful meditation on love is that you don't treat it like a switch. You don't treat it like there's a there, there you treat it like a process.

26:02And what is your kind of, you know, for anyone who I think struggles with, I mean, if, if, if kind of radical love is here and then some type of love that maybe we were taught, but maybe isn't even truly love is here. And then maybe even okayness is here. And someone's even just trying is starting from rock bottom. What is living a life where there's room for love look like? For me, there's like the radical self-love when you really get it. It's like you get a hit, you know, God, it's so wonderful. For me, it's that as I've gotten older, and I've been sober, coming up on 38 years now, I've learned to get along with myself.

26:44You know, I get along with myself all the time, most of the time. And I learned from the women, the sober women who fished me out of the slew of active drug addiction and alcohol. I learned to take care of myself the way I would take care of you. Now, we've never been in person together, right? But if we were and you were having a really hard day, I would intuitively know what you needed. I know you did not need advice or a nice bumper sticker or platitude. You needed a gentle woman to sit near you and to listen and to get you a cup of tea and to let you talk without having opinions. And then I'd say, do you want to take a little walk?

27:29And we'll go outside and we'll look up, you know, we'll look at the trees. we'll look at the sky we'll look at the birds or would you rather take a nap why don't I why don't I just get you all cozy on your couch and I'll wake you in 15 minutes I'll come you know I know how to do everybody else on you know that I have a connection with and then with me I need to remember it you know when I first got sober somebody said to me we take the action and the and the insight and the insight follows and that follows on that figure it out is not a good slogan And we take the action. The action is self-love.

28:05So I know I need to take what I know to do with my child, my grandchild, and all my closest friends and somebody who came to me in need. And I need to do that with myself. What do you need, Annie? Well, I'm just exhausted. I feel really overwhelmed. Well, what would help? In recovery, they always talk about halt, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. And if I'm off, I'm almost always one of those things. and then if I know which one it is and it could be three at once did I already share the three A's of recovery with you yet okay that's a tool in my tool belt it really really helps it's the the first one is the awareness a the first day you're off you know you're you're jittery or you're a little prickly or crunchy you know and you're you're responding in a way that's a little bit harsh because you're off right and it's the awareness of it oh I'm just what's going on the second a is the acceptance well you know i'm i'm i think i'm acting this way because i'm tired and because i have to keep track of so much stuff i'm in pre-publication now and i have a million things on any given day to keep track of and i'm sleepy and i'm this and i just it's it's totally fine i totally accept it i accept me as is like i always tell my sunday school kids this is an as is party you know as is you are loved and chosen and then the third a is the action what's the loving action do you put lotion on your thighs because you feel jiggly do you do you need to eat are you lonely do you need to try to find a girlfriend who can go up to the mountain with you to just sit there in nature for 20 minutes what you know action we take the action and the insight follows that we are beautiful and we are deserving of love and that it is all around us I mean most of somehow is based on the premise that when Einstein said there's only one thing and everything is made out out of it at different speeds like your little child's at one speed and my desk is is the same material but at a slower speed the glaciers are going really slowly and the hummingbirds really quickly, but I think you can make a case that the energy is love, that we're made of love for love, that we breathe it in, that everything ultimately is love.

30:30And so somehow the actions I take, if they are reflective of that, then the pond inside of me settles. When I had my daughters, I feel like it was the greatest confirmation I ever had that love is our birthright, because, and that it was something we had to remember or return to within us because I saw these two beings delight in themselves from the moment they arrived or I could really, you know, that, that kind of four month period where they're opening their eyes and they're eating their toes. And, and, you know, I feel that so much of our, the, the, one of the greatest hurdles to get over between ourselves and that remembering or returning to love or ability to love ourselves is knowing that we deserve it or that it is our birthright or it does belong to us.

31:26Do you think that if someone's really looking for that missing piece, is that spiritually found? Where is that located for you? oh god my best girlfriends and my very beloved best boyfriend Doug have given that to me because you know they've mirrored it because I love them so much I accept them so much I see that they are just perfectly imperfect and I literally couldn't love them more but yeah what happens at some point and probably three or four is that really toxic self-consciousness enters right and then the inner critic that Neil writes about in Better Days. So between the self-consciousness and that parasite telling us not to try something and to stay small, especially if you're a girl, girls are supposed to stay small.

32:17The boys and the men are supposed to have the big juicy lives. I mean, I was 16 when the first issue of Ms. Magazine came out and I was being told, no, that's not right. And I was told I didn't get to be angry and that if I was really, really sad, I needed to get over it. I was just told so many lies about who I got to be here. And so the fact that I had these incredible girlfriends starting at five, I mean, I'm still really close to a woman who was Shelly, that was my best friend at six years old. We still walk twice a week. That's 64 years ago. In their love for me, it was some sort of alchemical mirroring for me because I love them so much and they I could tell didn't make sense loved me just and accepted me just as much and depended on me just as much and it somehow helped me come to believe that one of the beautiful blessings of age is that because the willingness to change comes from the pain at some age for me it was in my 40s you just realize how low the airplane of you is flying because you're just carrying all this stupid these stupid boxes and suitcases in your your psychic airplane and through recovery or therapy or church or the mosque or the synagogue or whatever your sacred community is little by little you finally start letting go of some stuff and you think i don't know how long i'm gonna live but i know i'm on borrowed time and i'm just not willing to do that anymore and you throw it out of the airplane and you throw more and more stuff for so many years I carried my parents problems and self-loathing or self disappointment in life or it's like I carried it in my backpack because I always did that as a child because they were unhappy together and I wanted them to be happy so a I danced as fast as I could so that everybody would love me and it would cheer them up b I was a perfectionist I was pretty perfect in school I was a tennis champion and and I and see I I came to believe that it was me that was causing their unhappiness and all this stuff went into the child's backpack and you get older and with because of the quality of your friendships and the quality of poetry which is where most of my operating instructions can be found you start identifying it oh that's what it is I never could put it into words until Ada Limon or Sharon Olds, the great New York City poet who I know you love.