Anne Lamott, at 70, on love

In April, the bestselling author Anne Lamott turned 70 years old and celebrated by launching a national tour to promote her new book, her 20th.

During that month, Anne visited 16 cities in 12 states in 17 days –a grueling schedule for someone of any age. The tour came nowhere near the Pacific Northwest, but somehow I managed to come away with a signed copy of “Somehow: Thoughts on Love.”

I’ll explain below, but first let’s turn to the author and her newest work.

Anne Lamott has been writing books since 1979 — 7 novels and now 13 nonfiction books. I’d read only one previously (“Traveling Mercies,” 1999) but I’d been reintroduced to her work through a series of columns on aging that The Washington Post asked her to write in the run-up to her milestone birthday and book tour.

If you missed them, here’s a link to three of the columns, along with an interview she did on her exploration of getting older and her evolution as a writer for more than 40 years.

“Anne Lamott’s meditations on life, love and the cycle of aging”

The new book, like most everything she writes, is marked by self-deprecating humor and openness, whether she’s discussing friends and family, alcoholism, spirituality, homelessness or her hippie persona. Born in San Francisco, she now lives in Marin County, where she’s known for her progressive politics and liberal Christianity. She writes with great compassion and humanity, occasionally peppering her prose with profanities.

Such language makes her all the more relatable considering that I’m, ahem, a year older than Anne. If you’re going to make honesty a hallmark of your writing, why not use words that lend authenticity to your voice?

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“Somehow” consists of 10 chapters and a coda. It’s a quick read at 191 pages in a hardcover book small enough to fit in one hand. And for me, it was a nice change of pace, considering the last few books I’ve read centered on war, poverty and other serious themes.

According to the book jacket blurb, “Lamott explores the power of love in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward.”

True. Very true. I’ll leave it to the professional book critics to elaborate.

What I liked was the way she composed certain sentences and sprinkled wise observations throughout. A few examples:

• “Getting old has made me a better listener even as my hearing goes.”

• “Getting and staying sober was the hardest work I’d ever done. I was scared and ashamed, defeated and defiant. Yet what those people gave me, and continue to give me decades later, remains the great gift and miracle of my life. They gave me me, they gave me a way of life, they gave me everything alcohol had promised.”

• “It is so hard for Karen to stay alive right now, and we both know she is about to die, but when I pay attention, I see that this takes a back seat to her being alive, stroking the luxurious fur of her cat, sipping her tea with a best friend, watching videos of her grandchildren. And her face brightens when she sees me; her light is still on in there, like a nightstand lamp beteen those dark, dangerous lungs,”

• “Life is such a mystery that you have to wonder if God drinks a little. How did my youngish, athletic friend get this disease? It must have been on a day when God was drinking tequila.”

• “I think Jesus would agree that some people are incredibly annoying. (Many days He had to lie down with a cold compress on his head.)”

• “Parents are constitutionally unable to throw out anything that their kids made. Almost all attics in America used to contain a clay ashtray with rounded indents where the child pressed her finger to create the place for the parent to rest their cigarette between sips. There are all the handprint turkeys from Thanksgivings, the book made of stapled index cards, the drawings, the report cards. Saving it all in a box meant you were a good parent.” [I remember making one of these ashtrays as a 9-year-old Cub Scout. GR]

• “I drove to church on Palm Sunday, six days after the latest school shooting.”

• “Why is it called Good Friday if Jesus dies?” The older kids are always my undoing. They ask why little kids get cancer, and why God doesn’t stop global warming, and I want to say “Go figure, right?” But I can tell them that God helps nurses and us care for sick kids. And God gave us Earth to care for, but we got greedy and power mad and we wrecked it. God doesn’t cause cancer. Nature does what it does, and God is in the healers among us.”

I tend to ask the same types of questions. But even if, like me, you’re not a particularly spiritual person, you can still appreciate the perspective of Anne Lamott. She writes beautifully and she expresses her opinions and beliefs with no apologies. She’s made a career of writing with empathy and honesty and this new book will undoubtedly be well received by her fans.

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Now, about that autographed book that made its way to Portland. How did that happen?

A high school classmate living in Poughkeepsie, New York, where the book tour began, snagged a copy at the April 9th reading and kindly sent it my way. I’d reached out to my friend, Diane Perea, a few weeks earlier to ask she knew Anne was headed her way.

“I am! And I have tix,” she replied. “I’ve seen her a few times before in California, where she was a neighbor of sorts.”

Who knew!?

Not everyone gets to live near a famous author, but any of us can share the experience of appreciating the same writer. A book filled with “thoughts on love” just might be the balm we need in these fraught times.

Want more of Anne Lamott? Here’s a Q&A she did before a March 8th appearance in Carmel, California.

“Author and activist Anne Lamott reflects on life and literature before her 70th birthday, and a talk in Carmel.”