In line with life’s perfect symmetry, an advance copy of Anne Lamott’s then-new hardcover, Imperfect Birds, landed on my doorstop, the very same day as the galley of my Writer’s Digest interview with Annie dropped into my inbox.
To write up that interview for WD, I had listened back to our hourlong recording of Annie’s lovely, loopy conversation about writing, sobriety, and spirituality. These themes weave through my life-thread as well.
Imperfect Birds,Published April 5, 2010 (Hardcover) Riverhead Books
By Anne Lamott
the third in a trilogy begun before Annie was sober, is about a recovering alcoholic, her new husband, and her daughter Rosie. Annie writes so full. Never is a sentence just a sentence. Each line leaps and dances, soars and crashes, finally opening a new door.
I reflected on my own mother, who, throughout most of my life, drank too. Clinically, she was an unadmitted alcoholic with suicide attempts and a diagnosis of schizophrenia. When I was a teen, she was also getting her degree in Early Childhood. When she didn’t have time to create a sculpture out of clay for a class, my stepfather did. I came home from school to see a nude torso of my teenage body sitting on the kitchen table. His only comment was “I know what you look like.” And then he laughed cruelly.
In Annie’s novel, she paints Rosie as the perfect teenager. Page by page, Annie lifts more of the screen that hides the truth. Rosie lies to her mother Elizabeth, very convincingly.
It seemed painfully familiar. The older of my two then-teenaged sons struggled with a dual diagnosis involving drugs, alcohol, and mental illness. He informed me numerous times that “addicts lie.”
He recovered nearly a decade ago. He’s back to being clean and sober. Sweet and kind again. And honest.
Annie’s work resonates with the pain and power in my own life. I found myself in our half-dozen interviews, and I felt less alone, sandwiched by family addictions.
Again, I reflected on my life.
Surrounded by booze, broken glass, and vitriol in my family of origin, the last thing I wanted to do was to be an alcoholic, too. Working in radio in the late 1970’s through the early 2000’s, that could have been an easy trip. In the earlier years, booze was in the control room, it controlled radio station events, and it showed up on the breath of the disc jockeys like my husband at the time and on newsgirls, like me.
Booze made me unpredictable. I recall giddily stripping off my clothes on the lawn of one of our radio stations, as a small tribe of us departed a late-night event. I recall a disc jockey telling me another time when I took off my clothes when we all were on a boat. I don’t recall the boat, the event or even being there.
Years later, the year I would turn forty, my disc jockey husband and I went to the 25th Annual Country Music Awards in Nashville. Behind the scenes of the award show, was a show of its own at the Opryland Hotel. During that weeklong celebration, we drank and danced with country music stars, opening each morning with drinks, sipping throughout the day, and drinking into the early hours, sleeping a few hours, and waking to a repeat. My husband told me I sat on Toby Keith’s lap that week. I don’t recall.
The incident – and who I could become – must have woven itself into my mind, because on my birthday that July, something unexpected happened. My husband and I went out to dinner, a tradition, and I had a couple of Black Russians before the meal. We killed two bottles of wine with the meal. And, after, I ordered an after-dinner drink, coffee with Kahlua. As we toasted, I surprised myself by saying, with certainty, as if rehearsed, even though it was the first I’d cognitively considered this idea, “This is my last drink.”
He looked up, startled. He held my eyes seriously with his, “You mean, tonight? No more drinking tonight?”
“No,” I said, images of my drunken mother laced through a rapid-fire list of memories, “I mean, ever. No more drinking ever.”
That line became my line in the sand. I was done drinking. Simple as that. Done. Forever.
I saw how Annie Lamott cleaned up her life, her family, and her writing when she dropped the drinking. That, too, resonated with me.
There’s a line Annie favors from her book Plan B, which I also love: Laughter is carbonated holiness. She moved into that place once she embraced sobriety at age 32. With that, she says, everything changed. Like getting the windows washed, she could see better and trust her mind, because it wasn’t the voice of addiction running the show anymore.
There is redemption, and there is love. Really, that is what we have. Love.
Annie told me that she knows that God made her a person who is good with words, who has a sense of humor, and who now can tell these stories of having survived and come through. She says some of us feel the tug to be our culture’s storytellers.
What I love most about her book, my article, and our actual interview, is Annie’s candor, and her insistent urging that if you want to write, go, be one of the storytellers.