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MS. QUINN: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Sally Quinn, a contributing writer here at The Post, and I’m delighted to be joined today by writer and acclaimed author Anne Lamott. Anne has just published a new book, “Somehow: Thoughts on Love.”

Congratulations, Annie, on your new book.

MS. QUINN: And she also writes a series of columns for The Washington Post on aging. Also, today is her 70th birthday, so congratulations on your birthday. Happy birthday, Annie.

MS. QUINN: You're only 70 years old today. That's not very old.

MS. QUINN: And so you mentioned in your column today that it's young for an old person. Seventy is about as young as you can be to be an old person. But I have to laugh when reading your column on aging in The Post, which I devour, at the idea that you think you're old. Why do you want to write about aging now at this young place in your life? Did your birthday have anything to do with this?

MS. LAMOTT: Well, first of all, Sally, I can't believe I get to talk to you ever in my life, let alone on my--on this really big birthday for me. I seriously have loved you and your work for decades and been just so--no, I've been so educated by your work on faith and just your--just your beingness, your presence here on earth with me.

But, well, I'll tell you the truth is that Mary--

Well, Mary Duenwald, who's my editor there, asked me about six months ago if I'd write these pieces on being older, and to tell you the truth, I was really insulted. I couldn't believe it, and--

MS. QUINN: But I'm definitely a little bit older than I've ever been, and I love writing these pieces. I am a young old person, but I also--you know, your inside person doesn't age. You know that. I know you're a little older than I am. But your inside person doesn't age. You know, we're still 57 and '8.

But, you know, all the systems are failing, definitely, the cognitive and the vision and the hearing and the balance and the--

MS. LAMOTT: But my writing mind has held up somehow, and so I just plunged in to see what would come up on the topic of being older, the blessings and the indignities.

MS. QUINN: Well, I'm stunned, as I'm sure most of your readers are, about your honesty. You're always being touted for your honesty, which is one of your greatest talents about everything but especially about your body, and what I find interesting about you is you seem to have absolutely no vanity. You describe your sagging butt, wrinkles, hip pains, dry eye, memory loss. You're so self-deprecating. I don't know any woman who would admit to all of that. Most deny aging.

But you could be wearing designer clothes and having hair and makeup, but you haven't done any of that. You've lived your authentic life, including with your dreadlocks, for decades. How did you turn out that way?

MS. LAMOTT: I think that everything changed for me when I was 32 and I got sober, almost 38 years ago, because until then, I had just been consumed with what my butt looked like. And luckily, I was a little anorexic and bulimic and a drug addict and alcoholic, so I was able to keep my weight down, which was what I was raised believing was one of the most important values. It turns out that it's only 197th on the list of what mattered here on earth when you get to heaven.

But when I got sober, the women who were helping me started saying things like, "Don't compare your insides to other people's outsides," and so I could see that other people looked to me so much more fabulous, that they hadn't been alcoholics, they hadn't grown up in the California sun. But I knew that on the inside, they felt all the same things that I felt, that the culture told us to think, that we marinated in from childhood like rump roasts, that what mattered was how you look and that you be pleasing to the male eye, and more important, more than anything, that you keep your weight down. And when I got sober, I started--the plates of the earth shifted, and I started thinking much, much more about the condition of my soul and my spirit and my heart and my being. And at the same time, this side of the grave, I'm going to care.

MS. QUINN: That's so interesting, but when I look in the mirror, I don't see my soul. [Laughs]

MS. LAMOTT: No, I don't either. I see--like I was getting ready to be with you, and I kept saying to Neal and my publicist, "I can't believe I get to talk to Sally Quinn." And then about eight seconds before the show started, I shouted at Neal, "I forgot to put on lipstick. Run and get the lipstick," you know.

MS. LAMOTT: And then last night I was at the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie, and my whole pitch was about the beauty of authenticity and the beauty of being a loving being here and the beauty of the light that shines inside of us by the grace of God or good--you know, Gus, the Great Universal Spirit, the light. And then before I went on stage, I said to the people that were with me, "Does my butt look good in these pants?" So, you know, it's a mixed grill, but you know it's a work in progress, and it's better and better and better.

I loved my 60s because what I found--and maybe I've written about it already at The Post, but when you get older, by the time you're about 60, you've lost so many people that you literally can't live without. And you start to understand that we're really on borrowed time and that you better make the most of it, and the action for me was to begin to let go of stuff that had kept me flying way too low for way too many years, like a lot of the fixation on myself. And so the plane starts to fly a little bit higher, and you notice that, and you love that. And you start moving more in that direction instead of more time spent at the gym, which in my case is zero time.

MS. QUINN: So I assume that you don't have any plans to pose in a swimsuit on the cover of "Sports Illustrated"?

MS. LAMOTT: Well, they haven't asked me, but of course, I'm open to that. Haha.

MS. QUINN: One of the things about aging is the experience of pain and suffering, what the Buddhists call "dukkha," and we learn as we get older that nobody gets a pass. You've had a lot of pain in your life, as you've described in your many books: alcoholism and drugs, trying to raise your son Sam alone and broke as a single mother, Sam's descent into drug hell, his baby Jaxs born when he was 19, you raising the whole family. How do you deal with grief? You obviously pray and meditate. Does that work? Does that help for you? And to whom do you pray?

MS. LAMOTT: Oh. Well, I pray to Jesus. I'm just a--you know, I really am a Sunday school teacher with theological understanding of a really bright second grader, and I don't--I learned when I got sober that "figure it out" is not a good slogan.

I was raised by atheists and left-wing intellectuals, and our battle cry was to "figure it out." And we worshipped The New York Times and The Washington Post, and there were little golden calves on the table when we first sat down for breakfast. This is in the '50s and early '60s. And then I just became accidentally--I mean, I write--have written a lot about how--that I became a Jesus girl.

I was drawn in--on some very on some very bad hungover mornings to a flea market in the part of Marin County, which is a very wealthy enclave to a very, very, very poor part of town. And out of this one ramshackle church, I was hearing the songs sung from the civil rights movement in which my parents were very involved, the old hymns, that "We Shall not Be Moved" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and that the Weavers and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger had sung my whole childhood on our stereo. And so I just went in and sat down, because I'd run out of any more good ideas.

Alcoholism is an elevator going down. It never changes direction. I was getting to the--it was still a year before I got sober. But I just sat there for a while, and I went there every week. And I left for the Jesus part because my family was just so anti-Christian, and I am too. I--you know, Gandhi said he loved Christ, but he had a real problem with the Christians. And that's pretty much how I feel.

But accidentally, a few months later, I decided to just let this brown-skinned Jewish revolutionary into my heart, because "figure it out" is not a good slogan. And I stopped in my tracks one day. I was living on a houseboat, a 10-by-10 houseboat. And I stopped on the pier, and I hung my head, and I said, "Okay, fine. You can come in." And I just--I never have worried too much. You know, I don't make--I don't make myself be able to explain things to anybody else. I just love him, and I love his mother. I mean, how can you not love Mary?

But anyway, so I pray to them, and, you know, when I'm in grief, when I'm in loss, when I've made myself just completely mentally ill with anxiety and judgment and resentment, which I do--it's part of the human condition--I pick up the 200-pound phone. I call one of my best friends. I say, "I'm not okay. Do you have a minute?" And eventually, we help--we end up laughing, and they don't ever say, "Really? God, you've written all these spiritual books. You've been sober 37 years." They say, "Oh, my God, I so get it. Me too. Let me come get you. I think we need to go to Target." So I do that.

And I often notice that I'm in too deep a hole to get myself out of, and I just say that to God, "I'm in too deep a hole. Help," the first great prayer. And sobering I go for a walk. I always get myself outside because--you know, my husband says at the beginning of my book, in the beginning of his book, which is called "Better Days," that you can remember everything that is true and beautiful about life on any 10-minute walk in the city, in the country, in the woods.

And so I make myself take a 10-minute walk. I look up. I look up. I've always told the story my pastor told that you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lids on them, because they just walk around on the bottom, bumping sort of bitterly into the glass when all they have to do is look up, and they could fly away to freedom. And a lot of the time, it's all I have to remember to do.

MS. QUINN: What are your final beliefs now that you're in the twilight of your years? Do you believe in God? You refer to God often as "she," and what is God? And do you believe that Jesus is the son of God?

MS. LAMOTT: Well, I do. I absolutely believe Jesus is the son of God, and I believe he's my big brother, and that when I try to--when I rely on my own best thinking, I just make things worse for myself and for everybody else. And I think I have great ideas for everybody else, and when I act on them, you know, they have to run screaming for their cute little lives because it's--you know, I said in that TED talk that help is the sunny side of control. And I even do that with myself.

And I'm just--you know, I'm a Sunday school teacher. I teach little kids that God is love and love is God, and that this is a come-as-you-are gathering, and you are loved and delighted in as is, which my parents forgot to mention when I was a child. I could always do better. We followed the forward thrust of intellectual America that we stayed--we moved forward as fast as we could more and more acclaimed, more and more position in the world, because they were--they were afraid of death. They didn't have God, and they didn't actually even have themselves, although they were very accomplished.

And so, you know, I always thought the worst thing would be for the abyss to catch up with you, you know, and--but the American way is when it has and when it did before I converted. It was like I just went to IKEA and got a cuter throw rug or something, and now when I fall in the abyss, I just asked God to come sit with me, whether he or she is wearing socks or not that day, is Jesus or, you know, the Great Universal Spirit, Gus. And sometimes God is in the form of my grandchild or the cat, or sometimes God isn't--sometimes God arrives in the form of the--I got a text this morning from a girlfriend. I had written to her, and I said, "I'm just toxic with publication. All I can think of is trying to get more and more people to buy my book and have this and that," dah-dah-dah-dah. And she just texted me some scripture that said, "Nothing out there is going to fill you up in any lasting way. Only God." And it is really true.

I mean, my whole life because I felt--I had such terrible self-esteem and such a raging ego, which all alcoholics have that ping pong game, I had--I could feel these Swiss cheese holes in my soul. And I just tried to fill them up with--you know, with rankings and with attention and with better numbers and better everything, and when you stuff anything into the God-shaped hole besides God, it makes the holes bigger and bigger.

And then, finally, I just got to, by the grace of God, stop doing that as often and as much. You know, and I do believe grace is spiritual WD-40 and that there is that long, thin red tube on it, and it spritzes you in your clenched-up, uptight, rigid judgmental places, and it loosens them.

And I don't get--I don't think God talks to me with a megaphone or skywriting or, you know, the Mormon tabernacle choir and in neon writing, but the right email comes or somebody in the checkout line at Whole Foods makes me laugh. And I get my sense of humor back, and that's what grace looks like sometimes.

MS. QUINN: Let's talk about love, which is what your book is about, and although it's not just about romantic love. Did you pray for a man to come into your life before you met Neal, and do you believe your prayers were answered?

MS. LAMOTT: Well, I always dreamt of having a man of Neal's quality. I was 63 when I met him, and we got married two days after I started getting Social Security. So the message is what my son has tattooed on his forearm, which is "We never give up."

But I'm--I had always been really, really good at being alone. I love to be alone with the pets, and I also had a great emptiness in my heart for my soulmate. And I'd had lots of men and a couple of long-term relationships, but here's the thing, Sally. I had dreamed of meeting a man who if he were a woman, would be my best girlfriend, and I'd been with men who were impressive and cool guys and well known or good or attractive or whatever, charismatic. But I always secretly knew that if they were a woman, they wouldn't be my best girlfriend because we didn't rock each other at that level.

I met Neal in--well, I forgot--2016. Thank God in time for the election. We met in late August. So thank you, Jesus, for that.

MS. LAMOTT: Anyway, and we met over coffee. Because I'm very shy and introverted, I don't eat meals, meals with people. But I said I could possibly have a cup of coffee with him, and we got each other. And we've never been apart for one day unless one of us has had to be out of town without the other.

And so, yeah, I feel like my prayer--but I wasn't begging for prayers. If you read "Somehow," it tells the story of having hit a bottom around this black belt codependence that I inherited from my mother, who was from England. And, you know, never, never, you never cry. You never--you never get angry. You put everybody's needs ahead of your own. For the 27 bad years of my mother's marriage, she ate the broken egg yolk, the broken fried egg. And so I'd always put everyone ahead of me, and my value as a girl in the '50s was dependent and determined by the value men found in me that I was adorable. I was a great conversationalist from an early age. I was trained to be. I was--you know, I kept my weight down. And I was a flight attendant, and I made men feel better about the condition of their lives, no matter the choices they had made. And so I--my--everybody else was always my priority, and then I took whatever was left over.

And one day, grace of God, 2016, around my birthday, which is April 10, I blew up, and I had been a handmaiden to Sam and his two-year-old and the baby mama, whose name is Amy, who I love, and to my--both of my brothers and to the whole world. And I went for a drive, and I lost it. And I was doing ugly crying of exhaustion and desperation, and, you know, it's another great acronym for God is the "gift of desperation." And I got there, and I cried all the way out to the woods, and I hit the steering wheel. And I said, "I am so sick of living this way. I am so sick of this emptiness of filling everybody else's cup with my life force and my very best stuff I have to offer." And I finally got back to my town, and I called my mentor of 35 years named Horrible Bonnie. And I called her, and she always would say, "Hello, dearest. I'm so glad you called," which is why I called her Horrible Bonnie. And I said, "I just hate everything. I hate how I live. I hate how"--and she said, "Oh, this is what we've paid for all these years," and she said, "You're nobody's priority because you're not your own priority, and you need to change channels now. And you are going to be in love with you, Annie Lamott. And it begins with stopping at the health food store on the way home, buying the most expensive food you can find and a bouquet." And at first, I thought, Oh, no, no. I mean, I'm born and raised in California, and it was even to California for me. But you know what? When all else fails, follow instructions. And so I did it, and I did it consciously and intentionally for three months. And God is my witness, Neal pops through the door.

MS. QUINN: And I'm so curious to know how you got the courage to go on a dating website since you're so well known. Weren't you terrified?

MS. LAMOTT: I was. I wrote about it. People listening can google "Anne Lamott" at Match and read about my first year on <a href="http://match.com" target=_blank>match.com</a>, which is pretty hilarious. But I realized I didn't know how to date. I'd always just kind of known who the next hostage was, and I didn't know how to have coffee with someone and just think, well, I'd love to see him again. But yeah, it was terrifying. But you know, in a Christian tradition, you do things afraid. You just pray for the courageous fear that has said its prayers, and I was fearful. And I said my prayers, and I had some hilariously terrible coffee dates.

And, you know, just to be honest, because I'm well known in my--in the Bay Area, people brought me--men brought manuscripts, you know. And I met this one guy I liked a lot, and I thought I'd be glad to have--we had a second date, and I liked him a lot. And then in between our second and third, which turned out to be our last date, he said, "Is it too soon to give you a plot treatment?" Right?

MS. LAMOTT: And then one guy I had a--yeah, yeah. I had a wonderful date with this adorable, handsome English man, and at the end, he said, "Can we do a selfie?" And he said, "I'll just be honest. I've just always wanted to meet you." So, you know, it was--it was very mixed grill. It was awful on some days, and it hurt me a lot on some days.

And courage is fear that is said as prayers, and I was afraid before every date. I get very anxious, and then afterwards, I go, "Yes, I did it. I showed up, you know, and I spent 45 minutes with this guy." And before I turned on Woody Allen, I used to like that he had said 80 percent of life is just showing up. I kept showing up. I kept saying no. "No" is a complete sentence. I'd say, "No. Thank you. No second date." And I put--

MS. QUINN: Neal knew who you were, right?

MS. LAMOTT: I mean, he wasn’t like a fanboy, which was disappointing. But he’d read--you know, unfortunately, he’d read the piece on <a href="http://match.com" target=_blank>match.com</a>, which was where I really revealed some of my most hilarious character defects and feelings about some of the men I was meeting. So--but yeah, he knew I was. Yeah.

MS. QUINN: Well, he turned out to be a total hunk. There's a wonderful--

MS. LAMOTT: He turned out to be not only a hunk, but when we sat there--he's laughing now in our--we're in a hotel room in New York. He--on our first date, every single book that I had read twice, he had read twice, and he remembers the plot. I don't remember the plot of the book I read last night. But he would remember the plot. Every movie we had seen three times in our 20s, the other had seen three times. And we were just--we just jammed. And it felt like two things. If this were a woman, I'd want him to be a best girlfriend, and I think we could keep the conversation going for the--for however long we're both here.

MS. QUINN: So, Annie, what keeps you up at night?

MS. LAMOTT: The election, MAGA. As soon as my book tour is over, which is towards the end of April, all I'm going to do is plug in to the election and turning things around.

MS. LAMOTT: Fighting, fighting, fighting for women's rights and for the right--for civil rights and the rights--and the--and us as Christian left-wing people taking care of the poor. I mean, that is Jesus 101. Take care of the poor. Get thirsty people water. You'll be fine. Maybe go down to the beach. You seem a little tense. Maybe you should eat. Somebody will bring some food in. We'll talk later. And in the meantime, I take care of the poor, and I get thirsty people water. And there are many kinds of thirst.

MS. LAMOTT: No, not at all. No, no. I think I--well, first of all, as a Christian, it's just a really significant change of address. And second of all, I have been--I have had a lot of death in my life, and I have been summoned by a lot of families that were--that I knew to be there for them and their dying person towards the end. And I've just seen that almost every time it's a very gentle, beautiful, sweet, of course, painful, painful time of life. And it's so--it's just so sacred, and it's just so doable, you know, and hospice is the cavalry. And what you what you discover in those last months of a person's life, they're not thinking about all the promotions they got. They're not thinking about the number they rose to on The New York Times list or at Amazon. They're thinking about love. They're thinking about all the love that surrounds them that is making their last months or weeks so sweet and amazing that they're being cared for at that level, that they feel so entirely safe in the arms of their beloved.

And so, no, I really don't feel afraid at all. Of course, I feel afraid that Sam or my grandson or Neal will die, but it really passes. You know, I heard a rabbi say once--a woman asked, "Will everyone I love be in heaven?" even though I know heaven is not a big thing in the Jewish tradition. But a woman asked him, and he said, "No, but the thing is that you'll love everybody who's in heaven." And so I just see heaven as this beautiful place where you love everyone.

Henry Kissinger and I will do fine together in heaven, and I'm hoping that I'll get a seat really close to the dessert table.

MS. QUINN: Do you believe in an afterlife? Is that what heaven is--

MS. LAMOTT: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I believe to the point of thinking I know that the soul is immortal.

MS. QUINN: I mean, we go to this place that's heaven.

MS. QUINN: I want you to tell me for my own comfort and safety. [Laughs]

MS. LAMOTT: Oh, I promise, promise, promise. You and I will find each other and I--not knowing you very well, I think you'll be over at the table with the French cheeses, and I hope you have saved me a seat there.

No one can know what heaven will be like until that day when they cross over, but I absolutely believe that you will be caught in the arms of God and that it will--what Ram Daas said, it's like--when you cross over, it's like taking off a pair of really tight shoes that always sort of pinched your feet. And that's how it's felt for me to be here on this side of eternity.

You know, for somebody as extremely sensitive as I am, it's been hard to be here at all, and it's only the grace of God--and I mean this literally--the depth of the love and friendships of my close friends that has made it be doable and so amazing, that the reason I have so much faith is because of the quality of my best friends. And so, no, I can promise you if we were together after we finished this, I would just pray for you for the peace that passes all understanding, that no one can describe what it will be like, but except that it will somehow be love and desserts all you want.

MS. QUINN: Anne, you quote William Blake saying that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love. I don't know quite what that means. Surely, there is no grief like the grief caused by love.

MS. LAMOTT: Of course. And I say that a lot in the book, but that nothing will hurt as much as love lost, but nothing can pull you back to your feet but love and dust you off and help you start out off again very slowly.

But, you know, a lot of us that were the black belt codependents were love givers and hope givers, hope bringers and love bringers, in whatever form that we had to offer everybody else. But the miracle--and I got this when I got sober was--that I could take off my armor. Like, you know, Duncan Trussell, the comedian, says that when you meet him, you're meeting his bodyguard when you first meet him. And I learned little by little that I could take off my bodyguard with more and more people--I could take off my armor and send the bodyguard off to the library just to read for an hour while I get my work done or commune with a new person--

MS. LAMOTT: --and then I could learn to endure it. It's scary. What if they see me too deeply and too intimately, and they see who I really am and what a mess I am and what a fraud I am and what--my awful secret life? But you know what? The deeper and deeper I go with someone, the more often we're both nodding our heads and going, "Yep. Same, same. Me too. Done that. Thought that." Thought that this morning before I called you.