Tag: Anne Lamott

Quote of the Week from Anne Lamott

On By Jennifer Mugrage9 Comments

As a reminder, I am posting this purely in fun.

I remember one year my friend Carpenter and I had books out on the same day. We talked about it all summer. We each pretended to have modest expectations. I had modest expectations for his book; he had modest expectations for mine. The week before, we talked almost every morning about how excited we were and what a long time we had waited, and how it was just like being a little kid waiting for Christmas Eve. Finally the big day arrived and I woke up happy, embarrassed in advance by all the praise and attention that would be forthcoming. I made coffee and practiced digging my toe in the dirt, and called Pammy and a few friends to let them congratulate me. Then I waited for the phone to ring. the phone did not know its part. It sat there silent as death with a head cold. By noon the noise of it not ringing began to wear badly on my nerves. Luckily, though, by noon it was time for the first beer of the day. I sat by the phone like a loyal dog, waiting for it to ring. Finally, finally it rang at four. I picked up the phone and heard Carpenter laughing hysterically, like some serial killer, and then I became hysterical, and eventually we both had to be sedated.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, p. 213

Misanthropic Quote: Anne Lamott on Paranoia

On By Jennifer Mugrage8 Comments

Almost all [of my writing students] have been writing for at least a little while, some of them all their lives. Many of them have been told over the years that they are quite good, and they want to know why they feel so crazy when they sit down to work, why they have these wonderful ideas and then they sit down and write one sentence and see with horror that it is a bad one, and then every major form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the water like trout — the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation. And especially, the paranoia.

You can be defeated and disoriented by all these feelings, I tell them, or you can see the paranoia, for instance, as wonderful material. Surely one of your characters is riddled with it …

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, pp 10 – 11

Misanthropic Quote of the Week: Anne Lamott on Jealousy

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

I went through a very bad bout of jealousy last year, when someone with whom I am (or rather was) friendly did extremely well. It felt like every few days she’d have more good news about how well her book was doing. It threw me for a loop. I am a better writer than she is. Sometimes I would get off the phone and cry. I felt like the wicked stepsister in a fairy tale. I told another friend, and she read me some lines by a Lakota Sioux: ‘Sometimes I go about pitying myself. And all the while I am being carried on great winds across the sky.’ That is so beautiful, I said; and I am so mentally ill.

Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird, which was referenced by Andrew Peterson in his interview yesterday