Introducing Soul Boom: Anne Lamott: What is the Key to Lasting Love?

27:43I'm sorry. Because I sleep with my cats. The only reason I'm semi-okay most days is because of my cats and my dog. Yeah. And I thought - You just shave them. I know, right? Or get those bizarre Mr. Bigglesworth cats, you know, that are kind of - Yeah, the hairless. The kind of cats in the loosest sense of the word. Do they make little hazmat suits for cats? Because you could put a cat in a hat. You could do that. A cat mat, hazmat suit, and then they would be toxic to Neil. Exactly. Anyway, so you had tried to date Neil. And he was like, I don't know. And I also, by then, because I was doing this radical romantic self-love with myself, I didn't feel like a lot of urgency.

28:21And I kind of let it go. On our time, I see this guy. You've seen him. He's tall. He's great looking. He's dear. He's smarter than shit. I like Neil. I like Neil too. Immediately. He's smarter than I am. Like he's, we have a dog, very smart dog who's smarter than I am, but not smarter than Neil. Like he's got this kind of crystalline intelligence. But anyway, I saw him. I liked the profile and I wrote to him. I said, oh, I wonder if you might want to have coffee. I like your profile. And he said, you've already rejected me. I think it's because I'm not Jesus enough. Well, I could care less whether someone's Jesus or not.

28:57It's just my thing. It's like. He's way too tall for Jesus. Right. Exactly. Right. Jesus was probably like 5 '1". Probably. And he's got like size 14 shoes. Right. And Jesus got like little sandals, little ten, size nine shoes. Jesus would have a hard time washing Neil's feet. They're so big. Correct. Exactly. He might have drawn a line right there. It's like, I'm going to wash Judas' feet. Neil, I'm sorry. They're just too big. Yeah. I draw a line. Like Peter, Paul, Matthew, Tim, Scotty, come over here. Yeah. Wash Neil's feet. Then we got together for coffee because I don't have meals with people, and we just grokked each other.

29:31We wanted to keep the conversation going. That was the thing. I know, right? That's so exciting. And it's real life, and it gets very lifey some days. Can I read a quote that I read of yours this morning? You said in an article, if you're paying attention and making your own life as beautiful and rich and fun as it can be. You might just attract someone who's doing the same thing. Yeah. You can give up on tracking someone down with your butterfly net. That's right. You do the work. You do the healing. A lot of people ask, what do you do for your teenagers? My son got very, very lost in drugs and alcohol.

30:13And grace of God, the sober men in San Francisco fished him out almost 14 years ago. But he got very, very lost. and people say, what do you do? My kid's lost. My kid's furious. My kid's, I say, you do the healing. You do your own work. You know, you become a person of wholeness. You become a person who's not projecting your own shame onto your kid, your own desperation to achieve in the world onto your own kid. And I'm a Sunday school teacher. I have, and I had a failing church. So I might have two nine-year-olds and two teenagers in the same class. But, you know, the teenagers in so many cases, they look at their parents and the parents are racing along around all day, every day with these meaningless to-do lists, getting more and more done, trying to achieve, trying to keep their weight down, trying to get to the gym.

31:06And the kids just grieve. They think, I don't want to be like that. I don't want, is that what life is like? And you go, no, you know, I'm clean and sober. I have a spiritual path. I live to get back outdoors every day. You know, I have my pets. Yeah. And I love my life. And it gets very lifey. And there are some tools I can share for you for when it gets tough. Right. That's what I teach my Sunday school kids. Right. And so with the parents that come out, you know, to talks or lectures or something, I say, do your own healing. Get yourself back. Yeah. Get yourself back.

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37:03I love this idea, love this idea, because your ode to love is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. I recently had the incredible bounty of meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Northern India with Arthur Brooks. And Arthur Brooks was asking all these probing questions about the meaning of life and transcendence and modern society and what humans need. And every single answer of the Dalai Lama, just, it's almost like he didn't hear the question and he just unfolded a different chapter about love. Just profound, deep, searing, all-encompassing, that there really is no, that existence is love.

37:48God is love. The hippies were right about that. So was Jesus. God is love. Love is in the scintillating molecules between us. I'm wondering about those barriers to love because it's something I think about with myself a lot. I wouldn't describe myself as a particularly loving person. And even in the 30 some years I've been with my wife, like I kind of learned how to lover about 10 years ago. You know, it was, it was rocky to say the least. And because my love, those barriers to love for myself had to be unpacked, not bird by bird, but brick by brick from the destructive circumstances of my traumatic childhood and terrible love being modeled for me by my dysfunctional parents.

38:40And I really was like in my late forties that I learned really what love is. And therapy was a very valuable process. I'm also in recovery, 12 steps, a very valuable process for, for unpacking that as well. But I still wonder to this day, like, why am I, what would it be like to just live in a total love vibration? Like, just, can we do that? Can we be St. Francis of Assisi? Can we be the Dalai Lama? Can we be Father Greg Boyle? Can we be these people that just vibrate loving joy in the Baha 'i faith as Abdu 'l-Baha is the perfect kind of embodiment of a loving way of being in the world. So many great Hindu You gurus and swamis and thinkers have been able to tiptoe toward that.

39:35But what are the barriers for us for love, Anne? And how can we be total vibrating love machines? Well, I'm not positive that this side of the grave I'm going to be a total vibrating love machine. Okay. But I think you exude love. I'll stop. You exude love. I mean, I can see you just being brought to tears by people being tenderhearted with you and letting you be really vulnerable. I can see who you were at six. You know, I can see you were at three. And I can see who you are at this age that your love would skin on. And I feel like, you know, this horrible Bonnie said to me 37 years ago, Annie, watch the self-talk.

40:20You know, because my self-talk, I harsh myself. and I wouldn't harsh you. If you handed me something to read, I wouldn't go, God, rain, put it away and let's revisit it in 2025. I would be so amazed that you had produced something and that it was your heart and soul. If you're handing me something to read, it's the very best you've got of your heart and soul and your brain, your experience, your strength, your hope, and you hand it to me and I would receive it that way. But we're not that way with ourselves and I'm not that way with myself. But one thing that has helped me a lot is something I heard in recovery, which I'm sure you're familiar with, which is Chuck C.

41:03Telling the story of the priest who helped Bill Wilson get the AA off the ground in the 30s, who said to Bill, sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses. And I was on the road for three weeks just until a couple of days ago on a book tour and I brought two pairs of glasses that are the same prescription so that when I was being a certain judgmental way or having shame because of like a review or anything, I just changed glasses. I would physically change glasses. And I'd think, let's put the good glasses. Let's just see the love everywhere. And it's like another love person besides the Bob and the people that we've mentioned that just seem to be the embodiment of love.

41:49was Brother Lawrence, and he talks about practicing the presence of God. And that was his path, that you practice the presence of God. And that what I'm normally practicing is, you know, who's to blame is something I'm good at and whose fault this is that things aren't going better and how I have got to get away from this or that or a person or whatever. Or I'm thinking about, because the two things I think that you started this part of the conversation off on are what are the impediments? And I would say one is just, for me, I think you're fine. You really do exude love. You're like a child. And it's that endless judgment.

42:40This is good. This is bad. This I need. This I don't need. This I got to go. this, I'm out of here. This, I have two to three minutes for this. I know you and I could talk for the rest of the day, right? If we wanted to. Let's do it. Yeah. And that endless snap judgment, this is good, this is bad. He's a bad guy. He's a bad guy. Grace is spiritual WD-40. Grace is unearned love. Grace meets you exactly where you are, but grace doesn't leave you where it found you. Marjorie Taylor Greene is loved exactly as much as the grandchildren you'll have someday. Go figure, right? But figure it out is not a good slogan in the spiritual world.

43:22Sorry to interrupt. Father Gregory Boyle, who is one of my top three heroes of all time. He said, God is enamored of everything you are doing all the time. And he says that to the gangbangers in his program. Yeah. And just like that idea of like being watched and someone watching you with delight and adoration. Every choice you're making, good or bad, like, oh, they did that. Oh, that's okay. They're doing that. Oh my goodness. I know. No matter what. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, when my son was out there on meth and alcohol, there was literally, I mean, it was a nightmare. There wasn't a moment when I didn't feel this unconditional love.

44:05He was my child. and that's how God feels about us. It's unfathomable love. On that, I always think about people who, part of the book in Soul Boom is, I have a chapter called The Notorious G.O.D., which is kind of a re-imagining of God from the ground up or from the sky down. But this idea of a judgmental, what I call sky daddy, which is so pervasive. There was a, I think it was a Michelangelo painting and it was Jesus and the father and the father was embracing Jesus and the father was, and God was like larger than Jesus had his kind of arms around him and God was balding. And I thought that's an odd choice.

44:52God can have any hair that he wants. Why would God choose to be balding or someone choose to, if I was, I'm losing my hair. I would have a magnificent head of hair and a little more Zeus hair, the Odin hair, rather than the Michelangelo God hair. But I guess the point is that that idea of judgmentalism, like I think about my son. That's the first thing. But go ahead, tell me about that. So my son, Walter, and you know, like when you have a child, it opens up a new door to love. Like you think you know what love is, and then you have a kid and it's like, oh, there's a whole new world of love. I had no idea.

45:34It's like Alice peeking through a little door and there's a whole other garden back there. You're like, oh, I thought I was just falling down this rabbit hole and there's a beautiful garden. I want to get to that garden, to quote the hippies. And my adoration for Walter, even when he's making mistakes, just my love for him is so vast. Can you imagine God's love for us as his children in that sense? Because it's times a bazillion. So how could there be judgment? How could there be kind of like a snarky condemnation from Sky Daddy in that kind of paradigm? Yeah, it's not possible. As I wrote about in somehow God doesn't have an app for not love.

46:16No, we would feel, I would express that not love is killing us, right? And so the crazy experiment might be in love, right? In practicing the presence of love, of putting the good pair of glasses on, which are loving, which see that everyone is engaged in an invisible struggle that we have, no matter how arrogant or destructive they appear on the surface, they're engaged in a struggle that is just devastating to them. But that endless judgment of he's an asshole, she's a this, that's like us projecting out the endless judgment of ourselves, that we've squandered our time, that we didn't pursue this or that, that we've wasted so much of our life on what other people think about us, trying to get certain critics to adore us and give us the FDA stamp of approval.

47:07Well, it's an inside job. You know that as well as I do. The self-respect and the delight that we know God feels towards us because we feel it towards our kids. But so that endless judgment and you practice catching yourself. You go, oh, wait, I'm doing that again. Like my husband's work is with the inner critic, And he teaches you when this voice is telling you that you shouldn't try that. It's too scary. The New York City critics won't like it. The Hollywood critics won't like it. Blah, blah, blah. That you just say to it, oh, it's you again. You've had it since you were a little child. And you do the practice of saying, oh, it's you again.

47:42But with the judgment, you just go, oh, it's you again. It's what my parents did. This is how they taught us to feel that we were of value, even though they couldn't stand each other. There was alcoholism. So getting rid of that judgmental, that incessant judgmental voice, and as you know, in recovery, we do character defects. And top of my list of especially my top five is judgmentalism. Me too. I can be very judgmental. But the judgment and that endless judgmental voice, I've recognized because of the path I've been on, it's like a toxic comfort zone because you know what it is? It's home. You know, mom and dad might be nearby, and this time they got help.

48:25You know, I had OCD. I was turning off my light switch 17 times off and on every night before I went to bed. I had migraines at five years old. They didn't notice something was wrong with what they were doing to their children. They didn't notice what they were doing to their children or they let it go. And so for me to be in this energy that is toxic, that is judgmental, that is total separation from me, you, God, from everything, from all of life, it's home, right? And you have to find a new home. You have to find a home within yourself, this glade inside of you where for me, it's me and Jesus and my little one.

49:11And that's my glade. And then right outside that, like outside the bullseye circle is Neil and my son and my three best friends and my younger brother. And they're the first ring of the bullseye, right? And the second ring is like a bunch more friends who I really love and trust. About six rings out is standing at a podium and saying, I think you all have this. I think you all have probably equal proportions of grandiosity and raging ego. and self-doubt or even self-loathing. And so you begin to say it and it breaks the trance, you know. But that's how you wear down the judgment is you stop doing it to yourself so much.

49:53You know, you put the, you notice that you're projecting it out onto other people, the fact that you, I never looked right. I had this frizzy hair. I didn't look, I weighed zero pounds. I weighed like 30 pounds in seventh grade, which is, you know, operating instructions, I go into this existential despair because I've given birth to someone who's going to have to go through seventh and eighth grade, which is like the sixth ring of the, yeah, right. Yeah. Dante's infernal. I didn't ever really bounce back from that. And, and I've, and I've made. And now, and add social media to that. And add social media to that.

50:31Yeah. People are not liking your photos and posting all of their sexy photos. Right, right. And their bikini photos. But so one tool is that you start doing Neil's work of just saying, oh, it's you. It's how I survived a really terrifying childhood was by thinking I was the problem, right? If I'm the problem, then I have some control over this situation because I can do better. If I think I'm the reason mom and dad aren't happy, there's a solution. And it's for me to do better. It's for me to need less. It's for me not to cry. We got sent to our, I had an English mother. I had a father raised in, you know, imperial Japan in the 20s by Christian missionaries.

51:15And so you don't cry and you don't get angry. And all children of alcoholics agree at a very early age not to see what's going on. So some of the work is that you learn to cry. You learn to do your anger with someone healthy. and you agree if you're going to be a writer, you have to do this to start to respect yourself as the narrator of your life. You unsign that contract where you didn't see it because it made your parents, your dad, feel so bad about his life so that you take it on. You put it in your own backpack. You do the work with a mentor or a therapist or whoever to start taking that stuff out of your backpack that was your dad's and your mom's.

51:58the endless, endless judgment. Is the person I'm loathing or judging or rejecting some kind of funhouse mirror for me? Right. Right. And in the last book I wrote, I used that wonderful line of Martin Luther King's, like, don't let them get you to hate them. Because if you let them get you to hate them, you've lost that glade of love and the sweetness that you can see through the glasses that they're a child of God. But Trump, for instance, is a man who was never loved, not even once until he had a daughter, never once before or since. I don't think he knows his grandchildren's name, but that's just me.

52:39That's judgmental. But I wonder. Well, I can say that, you know, I think Trump is a textbook walking a definition of narcissism. And I can say that I also am a narcissist. And so am I. And a narcissist is not, as my therapist pointed out to me, it's not someone who is grandiose. It's someone who is either at the top level of grandiose or else the biggest piece of worm shit on the planet. Yeah. And you're in those two extremes, like I'm greater than everyone or I'm less than everyone. Right. And the hardest thing for a narcissist is to just be another bozo on the bus. Right, right. And to just be, I'm just a regular old person, man.

53:25And I can recognize myself in Donald Trump. And if I grew up with a gold-plated toilet and nanny and never saw my father and I was never hugged and my only kind of self-worth came through sexual conquest and wealth, then I could see me being exactly in his shoes. Yeah, me too. In that book where I wrote about the Dr. King line, I thought, I'm a narcissist. I'm a blowhard. I can be bombastic. I'm sure I'm right. My friend Tom W., the Jesuit priest, says, I never, ever noticed I was angry, just that I was right. And that's me, and that's Trump. And I have more sympathy towards him than most people I know.

54:18And because all truth is paradox, I'm going to work for the next six months to cut off the head of the snake because that is going to destroy democracy if people are going to support the policies and what he has said about what he will do. You know what? Democracy has been destroyed for a very, very long time. Oh, I don't know. It's limping along. It's so corroded and filled with hundreds of millions of dollars and a passel of politicians all tearing at each other's faces and stabbing each other in the back. That's been going on for a good 50 years. Okay, that's right. The mourning of the possibility that if the Republicans win the election, that's going to destroy democracy.

55:09democracy is already pretty much destroyed. They would just kind of tear down the remaining kind of termite infested foundations. Well, you get to think that that's not my belief. So now let's go to the second impediment in my experience with, with being in love and just looking around the way God might, but ever the other second, the second impediment is the shame, the toxic shame of having grown up. And I know many, many of your listeners are just fine. I wasn't, I grew up in a really frightening situation of parents who couldn't stand each other, and I internalized their shame. And so what the natural reaction to that is to figure out who I can project this onto to carry.

55:53That's what the whole Southern white racist is about, is that like gays or black or somebody is at least they're not gay, you know, or at least they're not people of color. They're white American patriots, right? You've got to find somebody to project it onto. And the shame is the most excruciating feeling I ever have. I make a small mistake. Got a terrible review a week ago in the New York Times, the worst review of my life that actually mentioned my hair and referred to some of my work as embroidered throw pillows. I so went into the shame spiral as if I'd never gotten sober or had 30 years of therapy and love.

56:39And, you know, my friend Tom, who I just mentioned, Tom Weston, he told me the shame secret 30 some years ago. He said there are five rules of being an American adult. First, you must not have anything wrong with you or different about you. You just need to pass in any circumstance, right? Right. Rule two is if you do have something wrong with you or different about you, you just have to correct it. I mean, you just do. OK. The third rule is if you can't even correct it or fix it or change it, you just should pretend you have. It's like a silly old thing that is from the past. You don't do it.

57:16It's not a problem anymore. The fourth rule is if you can't even pretend that it's not an issue anymore, you should just not show up because it's really painful for the rest of us when you do. Wow. That's great. And the fifth rule is if you're an assistant on the right to show up, you should have the decency to be ashamed. And that is what we internalize by kindergarten. You know, don't have anything different or be wrong. Fit in. Be look like Betsy Steiger who had soft blonde hair. I didn't have soft hair. Be like that. We didn't have enough. We got Betsy on the podcast next week, actually. Ask her about me.

57:53Okay. Narcissistic question right there. Right, right. And, you know, if you were different, if you looked wrong, if you were too big or too heavy, too tall or too short or too whatever, you didn't have enough money or you had, you know, there was a girl in my seventh and eighth grade class whose dad was mafia, big mafia king in the city. Tremendous shame. We didn't have enough money. Tremendous shame, you know. And it takes a commitment to that, the healing of your soul, the restoration to become the child you were born to be before they, in the paranoid sense of the word they, and the world, the culture got its mitts on you.

58:37But that is the impediment is that internalized shame about who we even are. That's beautiful. That's my understanding.

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1:00:28One of the things I struggle with, with the kind of Western world, with the liberal world, with the secular world, and with the kind of like moss-chomping yoga chakra embracing West Coast is you've talked a lot about heal yourself, forgive yourself, self-care, you know, stopping the judgmental voice against yourself. And these are all healing your internal trauma. All of these are the barriers to love. And you've talked about them in great length and they're they're uh super super important but i think for a lot of people that i know in this particular cultural milieu that i find myself here in suburban los angeles is it stops there it ends there they do that work and like i want to feel better so i'm going to heal my trauma i'm going to stop the self-judgmental voice i'm going to open myself up to love and like, ah, I'm feeling a little better.

1:01:40Mission accomplished. Right. Pull up the ladder. I got mine. Yeah. And what I love about you and your work and what you do is you never end it there. And it's, it is, you don't write about this very much, but it is very clear as a thread through your texts that you are of great service to others and that you heal yourself so that you can teach Sunday school and bring a macaroni to the potluck at the church and feed the homeless and clean up and register voters and be a part of your community and help heal the woods and be a vibrant and necessary kind of servant among servants. So how do we help folks bridge that?

1:02:31Because I get pretty darn frustrated that spirituality, therapy, trauma work, and healing kind of just ends once some of the anxiety has lifted. Well, you know, I'd say a third of the book is about community. And it goes with Duncan's thing about when you first meet him, you're meeting his bodyguard. his bodyguard. But a lot of the book is just about finding a group out there that moves you, that touches you. The people, the beginning bird watchers, the people who clean up litter, the people at the food kitchen, the people at the food pantry, the soup kitchen, the hikers. You know, there's this old guy where Neil and I live named Jesse, and he is so frail.

1:03:21He's 93, and he walks down the street every single day to be outside, to hear the birds, to be underneath the sky, to see his neighbors because that's his path of love. And you always see him with different people because people swing by to be his walker that day, you know? And that's one way to go onto Nextdoor and to find somebody who needs somebody to help them walk every day. Right, but there's a piece missing in what you're saying. Okay. Which is you have knowledge, you have volition, and you have action. Right. You're talking about knowledge and action, but how do you find that volition?

1:03:54How do you find that will, the will to walk, Neil, the will to clean up the trees, the will to go to the soup kitchen, that missing piece of like, ah, I have soothed this anxiety through these therapeutic and spiritual tools. How do you then find that internal mechanism that goes like, now I need to do something else outside of myself? Well, I'll tell you the answer. I love answers. young man. Yes. I bet you have heard in your years in recovery, the most basic step zero, step zero is this shit has got to stop. Whether it's with your drinking, your gambling, your black belt codependence or whatever, this shit has got to stop.

1:04:39And the willingness comes from the pain. We don't have the willingness if everything's floating along and we're just feeling really fulfilled and that we found our purpose as a tribal person. But the willingness to come into community will arrive most of the time from feeling that Swiss cheese inside of your soul that you are, you know, you're doing your three hours of hot yoga every day and you're with your therapist or with that you're doing this and you just feel you're going to feel, if you're not in service, you're going to feel empty. You're going to feel, you know, a guy told me, I got sober in 1986.

1:05:16He said, I came into this as a hot shot and the guys helped me work my way up to servant. And the Swiss cheese holes in your soul are not going to be healed by, by kind of fine tuning your own life and getting a much more attractive and enviable life. They're going to be, you know, I heard someone say, or maybe I read this, maybe you said this, that we think, we always like to say that we have a God-shaped hole inside of us, but that maybe God has an anti-shaped hole inside of God, inside of him or her, and that the way that we are going to fill that hole is by finding other people, because everyone's got those holes inside of them, and we're going to find other people who are conscious of it, who've hit that bottom, and who are willing.

1:06:04If the willingness comes from the pain, where does the solution come from? comes from, you know, the courage to try to knock on a door and to go on into a group. You know, courage is fear that has said its prayers, right? You're going to do it afraid. You're going to go to where the birders meet. You're going to go to where the, where you've heard that people, that the sober people, the recovering Catholics meet. You're going to go to where the Course in Miracles people meet. You're going to meet where you're going to go where the people that pick up litter every day meet. And you're going to at first think, well, this is ridiculous.

1:06:41I'm, you know, I'm very, very busy. I'm important. I have all this stuff to do. And then you're going to go in anyway because of maybe the Holy Spirit nudge on your shoulder. And you go in and you feel shy and arrogant at the same time. And someone comes over and they say, hi, my name's Rain. Can I get you a glass of water? Who are you? Come on in. and you go in and the miracle is if you get back a second time. I just thought of something for your next book. Okay, good. You said the Holy Spirit and you're talking about the God-shaped hole. The God-shaped Holy Spirit. The God-shaped Holy Spirit.

1:07:15Like Holy Spirit. Get it? Like Swiss cheese. I got it. Yeah, that tug on your sleeve. You can use that. Okay, thank you. Okay. Do you write every day? When I'm writing, I write every day. Yeah, I write five days a week. My dad was a writer and he taught me. he sat down at his desk at 5 30 every morning and he wrote till seven and you heard tap tap tap this is the 50s you know in the early 60s tap tap tap tap and then he got us three up there three of us he got us up for breakfast and made breakfast for us and he taught me that you don't wait for inspiration that no one's ever really very inspired and that you do it by habit you do it as a debt of honor because you have this thing inside of you that wants to write that wants to share some stuff that you thought was worth passing along that might be illuminating, cast a tiny bit of light in this cold, weird, dark world, or that was funny, that would make people laugh, laughter being carbonated holiness, or that might be a story you just wanted to remember because you don't want to lose it because you want to give it to your grandchildren.

1:08:19When you lived in Olympia and you knew the name of every single dog in your neighborhood, right? Right. And so he just taught me, you know, like the Nike ad six years later, you just do it. So I sit down, I sit down at the same time. What time do you sit down? I sit down at nine. How much caffeine do you have? I have very, I have two cups first thing in the morning. I wake up, I have, I wake up, I say my prayers. I fish around for my glasses. I let the dogs out to pee. I have a cup of coffee. That's my writing system. Okay. Yeah. Nine is a little late. Well, it is, but I have a grandchild at home.

1:08:54He's almost 15, but they're usually in, he needs food. He's getting ready to go to school. He needs breakfast. And we've got the animals. He needs screen time. He needs screen time. And I also, I'm not in a hurry anymore. You know, and nine works for me. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I get up early, but if I'm in the middle of something, I'm up very early a lot. And I write really late. Like when you are really young, you know, and you get the solution late in the - Yeah, second wind at like 10 at night or something like that. I just finished a piece. I'm writing these pieces on getting older for the Washington Post.

1:09:34Oh, wow. Yeah, I've written eight of them. And the other day, I was actually on the road, and at about nine, I was wasted. I was on California time, but I was on the East Coast. And it's like this solution floated into my head like a goldfish that was a structural change that I could do. And that was actually fun. And I rarely, very rarely say those words. And I worked till midnight, you know, and I just was caffeinated on. Ideas. On ideas. Yeah. And I, and I nailed it. Right. And then, yeah, so that happens. But in a regular day to day, I worked from about nine until two, but see, and then I sell for lunch and I, I do the same thing I did while raising my child, which is I operate on bribes and threats, you know, which is really the only thing that's ever worked.

1:10:25I'm sure you'll agree. So I'll say to myself, Annie, if you finish this passage, we'll stop and we'll have a peanut butter sandwich, the food of the gods, right? Sure. The bread of heaven. Yeah. And or I'll say, if you figure out the end, this last graph, then we're going to watch MSNBC for half an hour. And I... I wouldn't wish that on anyone. No, I do. I know it's a sickness, but it's my sickness, right? Okay. Yeah, and so, or I'll say, if you finish this draft, this unbelievably shitty first draft, then we're going to go for a walk. Oh, nice. With a dog. Yeah. Yeah. I love carrot and stick, but that's a lot of carrots.

1:11:06Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah. Delicious carrots. Yeah, yeah. What time do you start? I found that I was really only good from around 9 or 9.30 to about 12 or 12.30. Yeah, well, here's the thing. nine to say 12, three hours, that will buy you. I happen to know these things. That'll buy you just over two hours of real writing because there'll be 50 minutes of like squirm. I would say less than two hours. I would say an hour and 20 minutes. No, I say an hour and 45. You're gonna squirm and you're gonna be eight years old again and wriggling and feeling bitter because you'd rather be outside and whatever.

1:11:49But so that's the grid. That's what I teach at a writing room, that you give me three hours by prearrangement with yourself. You don't say to yourself, well, I hope I get some work done tomorrow, right? You won't. But you say, I'm going to get some work done tomorrow. I can put in two hours. You know, anyone can watch the 10 p.m. news, right? So 10 o 'clock news, you start at 9, you go through 10, you're done at 10.30, say an hour and a half. that's going to buy you 50 minutes of writing that you might get two pages done it's amazing you might get 500 words done you know and um and so that's my system are you a word counter i was i was definitely i'm definitely a word counter which is not a it's not a healthy it's not a healthy habit but i was kind of like but it's your habit you know it's yeah oh i got 350 words today or oh hey i got 900 today or i would run to my wife like i wrote 1200 words today but what my wife does and and i know you're also a fiction writer um she writes fiction which is very different because you're just creating a whole other world and you're listening and fishing for other voices and you're waiting for those muses to let those voices talk and you're seeing how this world unfolds.

1:13:07Yeah. And that's much more challenging than writing like Soul Boom was like, here's what I think about the world today, which is a little bit more of like, it's like what I'm doing right now. So I'm just transcribing thoughts, like think, think, think, write, write, write. But it's much - Novels are tough. Novels are three and four years because you've got to keep so many plates spinning in the air. You've got all your characters. And also you don't know what the book is until you finish a first draft of it. That's 300 or 400 pages. There's no other way to know who these people are and what they do, what they're capable of, what they refuse to try, which would, in your mind, be the best possible thing for them to do, and they're not going to, you know, and you can't get them to.

1:13:50You've got that for at least a year, and then you end up with an incredibly shitty first draft, and then you feel despair and hopelessness, and you realize what a loser you are, and then you do that for about a week or two weeks, and then you push back your sleeves and that's when the fun starts. And I know your wife would affirm this, is that when you have a first draft, you no longer have that unassaulted ice flow of blank paper. You know, it's more like, then it starts to be like Swiss watchmaking. You push back your sleeves, you're going to have to take out a quarter of it. You know, there's that great Jessica Mitford line that you have to kill your little darlings.

1:14:28You have to take out little passages and little moments that you just thought were so charming and funny or erudite. In my case, made me look more educated than I am. And you just have to take out all the BS. You have to take out the lies. You have to take out the pyrotechnics and the showing off and stuff. And you have a second draft there and you get to work it. You know, it's fluid. It's like you've pulled this big armful of rich black clay out of the river and you get to work it. You get to play with it. You get to take a lot of it back off the table, use it somewhere else. That's what I tell myself when I'm throwing something away.

1:15:07But a novel's really, really hard. What we do, what we've been doing is kind of like, how am I doing on any given day? Well, it's a little disappointing or I'm having a kind of a small miracle. I'm okay again. And it really wasn't yesterday. That's a good story. What happened? Good start with that. Yeah, yesterday you slipped on the cosmic banana peel and you landed on your butt and it hurt and people saw. That's what two of the stories in Somehow are about. Now what? That's a good story, but it's a lot easier than fiction. And your book, Bird by Bird, is, you know, maybe with the artist's way, like the most important book on writing in the last 50 years.

1:15:53Julia Cameron also, I teach at a writing room, and Julia Cameron did a three-week workshop. So what is this, a writer's room? What is this, a writing room? A writer's room? Is it a writer's room or writing room? No, it's called A Writing Room. But it's important. A Writing Room. It's not the writing room who are our rivals and who suck. This is arightingroom.com, lowercase, and it's a collective with teachers. And I did a book club, we can send it to you, where I took people through Bird by Bird 30 years later. You know, it came out 30 years ago. Wow, yeah, amazing. And I did something about a month ago called, I think it's called Unblock 101.

1:16:34And it's 90 minutes on everything that might help when you're stuck and when you've turned on yourself. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah. And when it's all hopeless and doomed and, you know, usually right after your parent has come in to ask if you've gotten an agent yet, you know, which they will do. And Julia Cameron also taught there? And she did, I think, a three-week workshop because she has a new book out. I forgot what it's called. It might be called The Writer's Way, The Writer's Life. Okay. Yeah. I mean, but she's magic, right? I really, the only reason I wanted you on this show is so you could connect me with Julia Cameron so I could get her on.

1:17:15You're in. I can do it right now. Arritingroom.com and your son is part of this and it's a collective and there's also workshops and just a support structure for people who want to write. I love that. I'm in. Yeah, and they support each other and there's a prompt every day. Don't we tell you the best prompt? I can save you some money. I love a prompt for free writing. A prompt, okay. Yeah. Okay. there was a tree. Okay, just get really quiet. There was a tree, Rain. So now tell me about your tree. Right. There was a tree. Where was your tree? Yeah. Did you see it? Was it the tree that your little kid fell out of and broke his wrist?

1:17:56Was it a tree where you first fell in love? Was it a tree where there was shade on one of the worst days of your life when you had just gotten rejected? But you know what? There was a tree. Tell me about it. I have two trees that popped up from my childhood. One was we used to live in Olympia, Washington, back when there were like woods. Yeah. So do you remember when there were woods? I do. So it wasn't all housing developments and cul-de-sacs. Like we had a little rental house. Yeah. And the backyard just went into woods. I don't know who owned the woods or what they were doing there, but there were just trees and gullies and creeks.

1:18:34And so it was amazing because I would just run around in the woods. right and one time i really had to poop and i pooped under a tree yeah and then i think the next day i was walking with my dad back there and he's like he looked at it and immediately knew it was me he's like rain why did you poop under this tree and i i it might have been my first lie it might have been my very first lie and i was like wow i think a dog did it and he's That's way too big for a dog. Now clean that up. I was like, oh, no. So that's not a very inspiring story. What was the other tree that came up? I had a, there was a plum tree in the back of our yard, of our other rental house in suburban Seattle that I used to just climb and sit in a lot.

1:19:25And then it would produce once or twice a year. I don't know how often plums bloom. Like an insane amount of plums. like gobs. I know what you mean. Like just like, no, I know chaos, chaos of chaos. Yeah. Yeah. We have that too. They, they bloom in the spring typically. And then they turn into plums in the summer. Yeah. Yeah. And we would just have bulls. Right. Plum giving plums away. And I would just like gorge on plum. I know. Plum juices were running down your chest. Yeah. Yeah. But I, I had a relationship with that tree and sit in it and kind of ponder the universe and my own existential dread even at a young age.

1:20:05Yeah, the nightmare of it all. But let me tell you another prompt you'll really love. Okay, tell me 10 things you've forgotten. You sit down with a piece of paper and a pen or pencil best. I see you have a pencil. Graphite, the sound of graphite connects us with antiquity, right? With a hundred million thousand writers scribbling down their ideas, their memories, their visions, their dreams, their hopes, their catastrophe of it all. Tell me 10 things you've forgotten. But you can think about it. You don't have to do it right now. I don't mean to put you on the spot. Yeah. Okay? Yeah. But prompts every day.

1:20:40That's a tricky one. Okay. So my wife is a creative writer, fiction writer, and went to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Wow. Has a couple books and stories out in lots of different magazines. She's finishing up a new book of short stories. And she, right on her shelf, since I've known her, is Artist's Way and Bird by Bird, just bloomp right there, writing down the bones. That's another great one. You've read the George Saunders book that came out and the Rick Rubin, both of them. Yeah, Creative Circle. And the George Saunders, what's his book on writing? It's going to blow your mind. You're going to forget you ever knew me.

1:21:15Oh, my goodness. Seriously. Yeah. It's called Something in the Pond in the Rain. Oh, Swim in the Pond in the Rain. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. Yeah, about the Russian author. It's going to blow your mind because it's about the Russian authors, but he uses it as a way to teach his classes. And so he teaches you through a Chekhov story, say, the power of an absence. Yeah. You know, how the absence might be the most powerful character in the story. Finally, I want to end with my favorite book of yours that I reference a few times in mine is Help, Thanks, Wow. And I really, it just put on a new pair of glasses for me.

1:21:54Oh, good. You know, and it was, sorry, I'm tearing up a little bit. I tend to do this sometimes. It meant a lot to me. It really showed me the necessity and purity of prayer and the asking for help and coupling that with both gratitude and awe and wonder. And I'm just wondering what your prayer practice is right now. And has it changed since you wrote that book? If you are writing version two, that's like a 20-year-old book. Would you add something, help, thanks, wow? How would there be another instruction? Well, I love that. My prayer life is I wake up and I say my prayers, and I pray to be relieved of the bondage of self, and I pray for the people I know who are suffering.

1:22:51I pray for the children of the pariah nations because for them it's like a triple whammy of being hated as a whole nation. And then all day every day I have this completely unsophisticated sense of Jesus You know, it's like Casper the Friendly Ghost, you know. It's like, and all day I'm just saying hi, and I'm saying thank you because you get so many breaks in the course of a day if you notice it. And I say, oh, God, thank you. Or I say what I said to you a while ago. I'm in a hole that's too deep for me to get my way out of, and then I just wait, and I get my answer. The phone rings or the text comes, the email comes, and then I say thank you, thank you, thank you.

1:23:37And I'll tell you, when I got sober, you know, there are these sort of flowery prayers in recovery. And you say them in the morning, and they're beautifully written out. And you say them at night. And this old-timer said, you know, I wake up in the morning, and I say, whatever. And then he said, you know, I kind of thank God all day. And then I go to bed at night, and I say, oh, well. So I kind of thought the fourth great prayer would be whatever. Like Krishna Murthy famously said when asked what was the source of his peace of mind, he said, I don't mind whatever happened. He said, I don't mind anything.

1:24:13And I thought, God, I mind him saying that or feeling that because I mind everything. So his peace of mind, he said, how do you find a peace of mind? He said, I don't mind anything. I don't mind anything. Yeah. And that's pretty much where Neil lives is I don't mind anything. It's kind of theater. It's grist for the mill. It's what's going on right then. And my reaction is what's going to cause me to have pain. You need to turn off the MSNBC because that's making you mind the wrong things, young lady. Do you hear me? Nothing against that particular network, but I think that the minute-by-minute kind of monitoring of the cycle of dysfunction.

1:24:53It's not helpful. It's not going to help anyone with anything whatsoever. and thank you so much for coming on the soul boom you've brought extra boom to the soul my wish for you and my gratitude for you is that you are an incredibly complicated person and i mean that in the best possible way and i said that to my wife the other week i was like holly you're you're very very complicated and interesting she was like fuck you what is that Like, no, that's my highest compliment. Yeah, yeah. Because you get to share your complexity over 20 or 30 books and interviews and articles. And we all benefit from your delightful rollercoaster of life.

1:25:48And I've benefited so much. So thank you and thank God for baking you in a complicated oven of interesting complexity. Thank you, Rain. Yeah. Thank you. Like a pretzel. Like a pretzel. Yeah. You're listening to Soul Boom.

1:26:20That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll. dot com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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1:28:19So long, everybody.