Anne Lamott Reflects on Turning 70 and What Life's All About

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I published my 20th book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love, on my 70th birthday this spring. It was an accident. I had published a very nice book three years earlier that would have been a perfect way to cap off a career of 45 years. Then I read the latest United Nations report on climate change and felt an urgency to capture everything I knew about coming through hard, scary times, to leave for my grown son and teenage grandson when I am gone.

I wrote a few essays on what has always gotten me, my friends, families and towns through crises and tragedy — the loving safety net of each other, service to others and radical self-love. Then I noticed at some point that all the pieces were about love, and I thought: “Oh, no! I’m writing a book about love!”

This sounded way too California for even me, a lifelong Californian. But there I was.

So I stayed with it and eventually had a dozen stories about love. Riverhead Books published it last April, the day before my 70th birthday. And I set out on a three-week book tour, visiting 17 cities in 19 days.

The last time I’d been on tour was in 2018 when I was a young 64. Now I am a young 70, or so I like to think. Although I do have bursitis in my hip, arthritis, hearing loss, failing vision and some (I am told) age-appropriate cognitive decline.

Still, I walk every day, am still writing well enough and am fully engaged in life. I’m a Sunday School teacher, an activist and a newlywed, marrying for the first time at 65, three days after I started getting Social Security. But the difference in stamina, focus and balance between a book tour at 64 and 70 turned out to be a bit more than I’d hoped.

I felt good the first week, traveling up and down the East Coast reading stories from the book and answering questions, one of which was always: Why did I call a book about love Somehow? I answered them with lines from the book: “Are love and compassion up to the stark realities we face at the dinner table, and down the street, and at the melting icecaps, or within Iranian nuclear power plants and in our own Congress? Maybe; I think so. Somehow.”

I shared on stage what I have learned in my time here. I live by a quote I included in Somehow, from Susan B. Anthony’s grandniece, that when faced with a crisis, “We remember to remember.”

I remember how often I have persevered in earlier hard times, bolstered by a few incredible friendships, gatherings of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “beloved communities,” my love of the outdoors and laughter: I told every audience that laughter is carbonated holiness.

I remember to be grateful, for the miracle of life, for having evolved into a (generally) more patient and forgiving woman, and for the beauty of the earth. I remember that I have persevered through so much, with faith and hope — early deaths, alcoholism (sober since 1986), single motherhood, a drug-addicted teenage son, clean and sober since 2010, who had a baby at 19. My grandchild is now 15.

I remember the tough patches life doles out to each of us. We remember hope’s return.

I held up just fine for the first 13 cities, and then the third week on the road began, and suddenly I crashed. I couldn’t feel the water wings that my faith gave me. Here I’d written a dozen books about healing and joy, soul and heart, how we evolve away from striving and hustling to the blessings of age, i.e. much less self-consciousness, much less concern with what people think about us and what our butts look like.

But now? My body hurt and my brain was fried. I was at different malfunctioning airports every day and then all alone — until that evening’s event. I was just wasted, befuddled and cranky.

Eventually, I resurrected all the old tools in the battered toolbox life and age have given me. Patience, and gentle amusement at our foibles. If you want to have loving feelings, do loving things. If you want to feel happy, compliment people. All you can do when you are lonely, shaky and far from home is to keep the patient comfortable.

So I babied myself like I would my husband or best friend: grilled cheese sandwiches, People magazine, naps. But even all this was not enough on the 14th day of my book tour.

I got up at 5 a.m. to get to the airport, only to discover my flight was delayed two hours. So I ate my body weight in greasy breakfast food. I charged an exquisite, hilariously overpriced salad to the publisher (don‘t tell) to eat later in my hotel home. I was seated in the second-to-last seat in the plane next to a sick, sobbing toddler who kept flopping over into my air space.

Then, the final straw — the receptionist at my hotel told me crisply that my room was not ready, and that it might be another 45 minutes.

I didn’t have 45 minutes in me, or being crisped at. I started to cry. I sat down in the lobby, dabbing at my watery eyes. I got out my formerly exquisite salad, which now looked like compost. I picked at it bitterly. And then at some point, I felt a sudden electric shock in my being: I had been in 13 cities pushing a book on how love is bigger than any bleak, annoying stuff life might throw at you, talking the talk.

So could I, in my current condition, start walking the walk?

Somehow is about the walk, that love is everything, that it always gets us through, because we are love, with skin on. As I have written and know: “In the very center is the truth of your spiritual identity. Fabulous, hilarious, darling, screwed-up you. Beloved of God and of your truest deepest self, the self that is revealed when tears wash off the makeup and grime. The self that is reflected in the love of your very best friends' eyes.”

When I finally landed and arrived at the hotel, I went up to the front desk and started flirting and teasing the crisp young woman there. I said I loved her nails — terrifying claws — and this pleased her. I showed her the terrible salad of death and announced, smiling, that it was her fault, and that she owed me. 

We started laughing. It felt like a small miracle, like a really slow day at Lourdes.

I had four more events to do, thousands of miles apart, reading from my book and taking questions, telling people that love would see us through, as it had just then, as I truly and deeply believe it always will.

Who's a fan of Anne Lamott? Have you read her books? Let us know in the comments below.