A Blissful Sit-Down with Anne Lamott at the Arlington in Santa Barbara
Anne Lamott Talks Joy and Love Through Difficult Times
Love these days can seem to be lacking, few and far between our everyday motions. But through the sludge of life, Anne Lamott is here to remind us that love is everywhere — in people, in inanimate things, in the small moments we get by ourselves, and in the new connections we make.
Lamott joined hundreds at The Arlington Theatre on November 13 to talk about her new book Somehow: Thoughts on Love, put on by UCSB’s Arts & Lectures. Always witty, Lamott had the crowd laughing throughout her lecture as she talked about how her friends; husband, Neal Allen; and son, Sam, all influenced and shaped her ideas of love in her book.
“I decided to write a book that was every single thing I know about hard times and scary futures … things that have always worked in the past, that would almost certainly work again,” Lamott said of Somehow. “I wrote three of these pieces and they all turned out to be about love.”
The book is a call back to all the different types of love Lamott has experienced and seen, especially when “life gets very life-y,” as she simply put it. Now at 70 years old, Lamott wanted to look at the familial, romantic, and community love that shaped her and brought her to her current place in life. “There’s so many kinds of love and when all is said and done, I believe it will see us through — somehow,” she explained.
Lamott delved into her faith and how finding community in her church brought her back to a sense of self that she had been missing “in the chaos following election day.” Lamott is a vocal Democrat, and read from a post she wrote three days after the election. Aside from this, she kept political talk to a minimum, instead focusing on a sermon that moved her called “You Must Have Forgotten Who You Are.”
Though she had been on the fence about going — “It’ll be loud and I’ll be upset; I’m very sensitive,” she joked with the crowd — she said felt a divine tug on her arm to join her friend on that Sunday. “I determine who I am — and I had forgotten. But that really helped me find my way back. That I’m a person who tries to be a woman of love,” she said.
And that’s what her book is all about: being a person who tries to be full of love, even when the world knocks you off axis or throws something difficult at you. Through darkened times of life, love keeps Lamott going.
Through her anthology of obstacles presented to her, Lamott still finds some way to love, even turning into herself to find it and heal. She told a story of being a family fixer — “being on the vampire dance floor” of her house, holding her neck out and waiting to be drained for anyone else who needed it financially or emotionally. She told her son, “you’ve bled me dry!”
Her mentor, lovingly called Horrible Bonnie, told her, “This is what we paid for.” She helped her realize that she had to love herself, get herself flowers, and the food she always wanted, among other ways to take care of herself. “I found this radical self-love, the hardest love of all,” Lamott said.
Her book details finding love later in life, knowing she couldn’t do any more negotiations in love, and instead finding a flow. And that’s how Somehow positions love, as an ebbing and flowing feeling throughout life told poetically through Lamott’s unique conversationalist style.
Each story adds a touching remembrance to embrace love in its different forms and to look for it in different interactions in life. Lamott closed her talk with something she learned in her 12-step program — awareness, acceptance, and action.
And in the action step is where she finds love. “The action might be to be with yourself the way you might be with me, or someone you care about. The action might be a nap, but somehow it’s loving where before there was criticism and maybe contempt,” Lamott said. “And all of a sudden you’ve created love.”
