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Writer shares her candor and compassion
Wednesday, October 27, 1999 By Tony Norman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Anne Lamott is used to wrestling publicly with her faith, with her role as a single mother in the modern world and the weight of an oeuvre that doesn't fit easily into any single genre.
This evening Lamott will speak at Carlow College's Antonian Theater where she is participating in the FOCUS Lecture Series, an annual conference sponsored by the college.
As the author of five novels and three best-selling books of nonfiction, including last year's brilliantly iconoclastic "Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith," Lamott is the literary world's most unlikely apostle of faith, justice and the compulsively readable essay. She is to bourgeois complacency what Nietzsche was to Victorian morality: She's not having any of it.
While resisting the temptation to glibness, Lamott isn't afraid to put forth a view of the world rooted in a contemporary understanding of what it means to be a Christian. She takes both her faith and her literary calling seriously, so depending on the reader's temperament, it's either a double blessing or a curse of embarrassing proportions.
Until three months ago, Lamott was a biweekly columnist for the Internet news and literary magazine Salon, but she's taken a sabbatical to write a novel. She broke the news to her readers in a typically "Lamottian" column that tied her uncertainty about the book's content to a providential encounter with an addict who'd just fallen off the wagon but desperately wanted to make things right again.
Lamott's intervention consisted of sharing her own struggles with addiction with a stranger who was hurting in a way that seemed painfully familiar to her: "When he woke up, his wallet and ID were missing and he was in the psych ward of the hospital in which we now sat talking," Lamott wrote of an encounter that arose out of the mysterious bustle of life.
"At any rate, I began to feel that God had jiggled a plane ticket out of the writing conference to get me to Mississippi, because He or She needed me to help this man stay sober for one more day. And en route, I discovered, or at least came to believe, that I should start my new novel. So that is what I will be doing for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, thank you for everything. God bless you, and you all take care now, you hear?"
Her last column for Salon was as candid and moving and full of inexplicable grace as the three years worth of columns that had come before it. Over her tenure as a columnist, essayist and writer of books, readers have come to expect and look forward to Lamott's explorations of such unfashionable subjects as forgiveness of one's enemies, the heartbreak of cellulite and salvation.
One of Lamott's most provocative "Word by Word" columns in Salon had what is arguably the least expected headline ever penned by a political liberal: "We are all precious in His sight, even Pat Buchanan."
"I am not one of those Christians who is heavily into forgiveness," she wrote. "And someone later asked me, 'What kind of Christian are you?' and I said, 'I'm the other kind.' During this Lenten season, I have to deal with all the rage I feel against Republicans. I asked my friend the priest if it was a problem for Jesus that I hated the Republicans and he said, 'Oh no, Jesus hates them too.' But I thought that despite what this holy man of God said I should take a look at my incredible anger at the Grand Old Party, as I believe it is called."
Don't look to columnists Maureen Dowd, David Broder or George Will for this level of honest grappling with the implications of one's faith in the world. Armed with a rapier wit and four decades worth of experience, Lamott makes even her moments of self-loathing a perfectly modulated critique of middle-class assumptions and loveless privilege.
Whether she's writing about cellulite, a cancer scare that affected her son or salvation's crazy prerogative, Lamott is committed to creating a good read and rooting out spiritual laziness in diverse places. That's what makes her talk tonight at Carlow College one of the literary highlights of the year.
Tonight at 8 in the Antonian Theater. Tickets are $12 for the public. Free to Carlow students with ID. Call 412-578-6032 for details.
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