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RELATED LINKS

• Ms. Lamott on "Meet the Writers"
• Review of Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
• Ms. Lamott at Random House
• Ms. Lamott on "Meet the Writers"
• Review of Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
• Ms. Lamott's bio
• Ms. Lamott at Random House

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Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Anne Lamott back to this program. Her acclaimed literary resume includes bestsellers like 'Traveling Mercies' and 'Bird By Bird.' Her most recent bestseller, though, is "Plan B, Further Thoughts on Faith.' The book is now out in paperback. I guess that means you did well in hardback.

Anne Lamott: Yes, thank you.

Tavis: (Laugh) Nice to see you again, you been all right?

Lamott: Thank you, you too. I've been fine, yeah. I am so pumped about your book, though. Let's talk about you.

Tavis: No, let's not talk about me. No, no, no, we're gonna talk about "Plan B, Further Thoughts on Faith.'

Lamott: No. Okay.

Tavis: (Laugh) But thank you for that.

Lamott: But congratulations for such a huge success.

Tavis: Thank you. I appreciate that, thank you very much for the compliments on the book, it is doing very well. But this book is doing, has done extremely well in hardback, and now out, of course, in paperback. Before I get to the book, though, I don't wanna forget this. Last time you were here, really important stuff.

Lamott: Yes.

Tavis: The important stuff. The last time you were here, your son was about to get his driver's permit.

Lamott: Oh, yeah.

Tavis: Do you remember this conversation?

Lamott: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. (Laugh)

Tavis: (Laugh) And you were scared out of your wits.

Lamott: Yeah. Now he's got his license. He just got his license three weeks ago.

Tavis: Now he has his license now. So how's it going?

Lamott: Oh, it's just a nightmare, yeah.

Tavis: Oh yeah? (Laugh)

Lamott: Yeah. It's just my life is a living hell.

Tavis: Do you ride in the car with him?

Lamott: No. I don't. But I had to for the six months that he had his permit. But I just want to tell people that are coming to the Bay Area anytime soon where I live; he's driving a 1995 Odyssey minivan. It's sort of silver-champagne. (Laugh) And the first, I don't know the whole license plates, but it's 4 CRY, it's easy to remember.

So you see that car, you do your Lemans, you breathe calmly. Please, so you maybe pull over, just get centered, and then reenter the traffic when it's safe.

Tavis: Now, how would you feel if your mamma gave you - straight outed you on national television. Gave your car, your license plate, told everybody, back away?

Lamott: (Laugh) My mother was the world's worst driver, so, and she didn't drive when I got my license. But the reason I got glasses, actually, was because I started to channel my mother when I was driving about five years ago. I realized I was driving like this, and I was coming up to stop signs and going, to look at the street and stuff.

And I thought, well, I must have a brain tumor, 'cause I can't read the street sign. Then I went and got glasses, and everything's been fine. But I drove before my mother did.

Tavis: That's amazing. Well, we're praying for your son.

Lamott: Yes, thank you.

Tavis: But more importantly, for you.

Lamott: Thank you, yeah.

Tavis: So you don't go into full cardiac arrest about your son driving. What did, aside from the fact that you're Anne Lamott, which impacts this, obviously, what did the success of this particular text about these thoughts on faith, what did that mean to you? What did it say to you that it was embraced by so many million readers?

Lamott: Well, that's a good question, but I think it partly has to do with how starved people are for someone to tell them a little bit of the truth. I don't mean to reference your book, but I think people are starved for the debate to end and people to say, look, this is just what's true. This is where we are. Let's start here.

And so, for me to be able to say I don't a con, I'm not gonna try to get you to sign on the dotted line. I think there are many paths to God, and yet mine has been through this funny little integrated church in Marin City, California. And this is what it's like, and this is how badly things go some day. And this is what's true, is that people like to say, oh, you can't have faith in fear.

And you can. God didn't say that. And people like to say lots of things. And because also, religion has been so devastated by the Christian right, if you ask my tiny personal self, and has been so devastating in the world. The damage done by the current administration will take hundreds of years to recover from, and it's all done in the name of Jesus.

That George Bush feels that he has a call from Jesus. So, if you listen to the people in power, you think God is an American or a male. I know this is controversial, but he's neither. And maybe not even a he. Not a, he, she, it is not male or American. And so I just I wanted to help people find a way to have that feeling that we're loved and chosen, and like the bumper sticker says, you are loved exactly the way you are.

But maybe God loves you too much to let you stay like that. But just as you are, you're loved. You don't have to quit being who you are, loving who you love. You're in.

Tavis: When you say that you reject the notion, as do I, by the way, that faith and fear cannot be present in your body at the same time, you can be fearful of certain things, and that's where your faith comes in. That said, I wonder if I might be getting too personal to ask you to share with me one of your fears that you had to really call upon your faith to encounter. To deal with. Is that too personal?

Lamott: Oh, Tavis. Oh, not at all too personal. It's just I'm a hilariously fearful person. But I've always heard that faith is - courage is fear that has said its prayers. And so everything I've done that is at all brave or honest or has integrity, I'm often really afraid. Because this whole culture is this lie machine of just pretend you're doing really well, and pretend things are hot and happening.

And wear the right clothes, and have all the accoutrements. And if you aren't great, just kind of trick it out with new curtains and stuff. (Laugh) And to just come out and to say, I am scared to death all the time, because since George Bush became President, I'm scared all the time. And yet I know God has a plan.

I know that there is this 90 year old woman at my church from Mississippi, baptized in the Jordan River. And no matter what happened, her kid went to prison, she had heavy, heavy stuff come down. And she said, I know my change is gonna come. And she could be in pain, and she could be crying, and very, very rattled in every possible way, but her deepest, truest faith was that was right beside her, hand in hand with her, was God just walking her through it like a child.

So, I'm very afraid. I think 'cause I had a big brother. I had an older brother; he used to throw snakes at me. (Laugh) And that's my excuse, and I'm definitely sticking to it. And I was afraid of the dark, and I was very sensitive, and I had migraines from the time I was five. And I had this crazy sort of kinky hair, and I got teased a lot.

I was afraid of people. And I just learned that things were gonna pass, and people always like to say, well, this, too, shall pass. But there's a great gospel song called 'The Other Side of Coming Through.' And boy, before you get to the other side, it's just challenging. And I think one of the most awful things about the real fundamentalists is to say that that must mean your faith isn't great.

If you're feeling challenged and stricken, and teary and lost, it means that you're doing something wrong. When what it really means is you're a human here on Earth, and it's hard. It's hard.

Tavis: When you say this, I'm looking at you, Anne, and I'm thinking I wonder if people, and the evidence suggests that people can handle it, given the success of Anne Lamott's book, "Plan B, Further Thoughts On Faith,' where you don't hide behind these things. You're very earnest and open about your own fears. So the evidence suggests, on the one hand, that a decent number of people can accept somebody coming at them in the way you are.

Lamott: Well, I don't exactly come at them, Tavis. Right, yeah.

Tavis: I mean that you're talking to them where they are, in a way that they can understand, in a very plain, spoken way as you are now, that fear and faith can coexist and you use one to get over the other. That's what I mean by plain speak, frank speech. What they call parrhesia. All right. The flip side, though, is that what we often give people is not what you're offering now.

But we give them, to your point, this kind of presentation where there's something wrong with you, if you aren't driving a fancy car, if you aren't living in a nice house. This whole prosperity gospel that we see.

Lamott: Oh, don't even get me started.

Tavis: Well, I wanna get you started. So, tell me your thoughts on the prosperity gospel, 'cause that's what we're giving people. And apparently, it's working better, with all due respect, than this is.

Lamott: Oh, it's definitely. (Laugh)

Tavis: Joe (word?) making more money than you are.

Lamott: Oh, definitely. But I actually kind of like him, 'cause he's sweet and smiley.

Tavis: I like Joe (word?) too, yeah. He smiles all the time, and he's cool.

Lamott: Yeah, he's sweet and smiley, yeah, and I don't have a huge hostility towards him, which I do to a lot of the prosperity teachers. Because it's like all, the golden calves of this country are what is the reason that we're in Iraq, is to get more of the fantastic wealth, and to get more of the oil that will fuel all of these fantastically expensive toys that are all built and sold on the backs of the devastatingly poor people in the country.

So to say, it's like golden calves. And it's also such a lie. It's like, women have grown up, and I don't know what it's like for you particularly, but women have been grown up saying all sorts of things can happen for you. You can have a really rich life, you can have a, if you keep your weight down. So about the age of eight now, we're getting a lot of anorexic girls that are eight.

And the promise is, if you can get your weight down or keep it down, you're gonna be fine. And the world will give you this stamp of approval. And then you're gonna get to be who you were really born to be. And it's such a lie. It's the same lie that if you got the right car, if you got enough money, if you could afford a mortgage for a house.

And it's such a lie. This country is filled with people who are slowly going crazy and dying of a very deep existential loneliness, because they've bought into the lie machine. And in fact, my dad wrote a book called 'The Bastille Day Parade' in 1970, Kenneth Lamott, and protesters had signs that said turn off the lie machine.

And so I've actually been pitching this friendly, polite revolution at Salon.com about having a revolution where we're not gonna have a lot more debate, and we're gonna do, like, exactly what your book is. It says here we are. You are here. Like the X on the map.

Tavis: Yeah, you are here, exactly.

Lamott: You are here, and here's what's true, and here are your options, and this is how things work. And so, I was gonna have everybody just show up and turn off their cell phones on July fourteenth.

Tavis: July fourteenth. I saw that, yeah.

Lamott: And I was thinking, you know, maybe noonish. Noonish works for me. (Laugh) And that you bring a piece of fruit to share. You bring a few dollars to share with street people. And you say, we're not hungry for what we're not getting. We're starving, as a nation, for what we're not giving. That's just the most basic spiritual truth of any religion.

Tavis: That's a great segue to this last question that I have time to ask you right quick, I think. I want to end this conversation by going back to the absolute beginning of the book. Share right quick the ham story.

Lamott: Oh, the ham of God? Well, it was about on my forty-ninth birthday when I was so depressed by the war and by Bush in general that I was just gonna eat myself to death for my forty-ninth birthday. But there was no food in the house. And my back was out. And so, I didn't want to die in crone mode. So I went to the store instead, (laugh) and I was shopping in this crabby mood, and I won a ham.

Tavis: You won a ham.

Lamott: I won a ham, 'cause I was the next customer to come by. And I won a ham. (Laugh) And I just thought, this was so disturbing to me, because I was praying just for God to help me, and help me get my confidence and my laughter back. Laughter, I said this before, but it's carbonated holiness. I prayed for that, I got a ham instead. I ended up thinking, well, maybe it's the ham of God. And if you ask for help, and God gives you a ham, you should receive it with gratitude. So.

Tavis: And then you were in the parking lot.

Lamott: Then I'm in the parking lot; I hit this Black woman that I got sober with. I hit her car, and she was crying. And she said, I've never asked for help before, but I don't have money for gas. She has a kid my son's age. We both were pregnant 17 years ago. And I said, oh, I have all this money. She said, I've never asked for a handout.

I said, this is my birthday present. This makes me so happy. 'Cause we're hungry for what we won't give. You wanna get filled up? You give. Give away more. And then I said, hey, do you and your family like ham? (Laugh) 'Cause I don't like ham, 'cause it makes you bloat, right? So, she said we love ham, we love ham for every meal, so.

Tavis: There you go.

Lamott: So thank you, Jesus, yeah.

Tavis: The ham of God.

Lamott: The ham of God.

Tavis: And the church said amen.

Lamott: Amen.

Tavis: Anne Lamott's book, out in paperback now. 'New York Times' bestseller. "Plan B, Further Thoughts on Faith.' Anne Lamott, it's always a delight to have you here.

Lamott: Thank you.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight. Catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith.