Anne Lamott and the Power of Hope

Let me just add, my favorite sign is, “Now you’ve pissed off the grandmas.” Trump and his ilk are systematically destroying the lives of his supporters. I’m sorry for them.

But the cruelty of the Big Beautiful Bill and the cruelty of the clawback of the $9 billion—those are getting MAGA’s attention. This is breaking the trance for them. It’s shocking that Medicaid and Medicare are going to be taken away. Everybody, or at least a very healthy majority of people, are on the side of Medicare and Medicaid.

So that makes me happy on almost any given day, to watch Trump just destroying the illusions that his base had. Their terrible approval numbers, dropping weekly.

PAW: In your book Help, Thanks, Wow, you write that your prayer on really tough days is “Help, thanks, wow!” Is that still your recipe for survival?

AL: I got sober in 1986, and I realized that most of the time, all the sober alcoholics I knew were going around going either, “Help me, help me, help me,” or “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” because someone stepped in, or because they were going to drink and they didn’t, because of a generosity that someone offered them.

I was just dirt poor. I lived on a 10-by-10 houseboat, and I was just going down the tubes. Then people would step in, and they would help me. I just started knowing that if I asked for help, someone would hear.

Of course, I’m a very left-wing Christian, so I also would believe that God heard; but somebody with skin on would also hear and help me.

For a couple years, people drove me around, and people paid my rent after I got sober. So those prayers, “Help me, help me,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” always seemed like they were enough.

Then I had a baby without any money and without a husband or a partner. Oh, I just started to reexperience myself as a writer. I felt like the windshield had been cleaned. I started to realize that I was so much stronger than I thought I had been.

So, I added the prayer, “Wow.” I’d take my baby outside. I didn’t have stuff to buy him. I lived in the Redwoods, and we’d go, “Wow.” And a white butterfly would go by, and we’d go, “Wow.” And the seasons would change, and it was, “Wow, wow. Holy shit. God, it’s just so beautiful.”

I’m still doing that daily. I mean, I read the paper and I watch cable news, and I go, “It’s all hopeless.” Then I go outside, and I go, “Wow, the monarchs have come back to California,” you know?

PAW: You’ve written about struggling with terrible anxiety as a child. Yet still you have this incredible optimism. How do you manage?

AL: My parents were very hip, very avant-garde intellectuals and progressives. That was a beautiful value to be raised with; we helped the underdogs. But I started getting migraines when I was 5, just from the stress of trying to hold my parents’ marriage together. I started getting teased in a really malicious way by the time I was 5, because I had this crazy hair. So I developed a sense of humor.

I realized that if I could come up with a retaliatory line, I’d kind of win, or at least I’d even the playing field. Laughter has always been my salvation.

I could just go under as fast as anybody because of the devastation and corruption and evil and cruelty. But I look around for what’s left.I think optimism can be a choice, a decision. That I am not going to let them defeat me. And I, every single day, no matter what, I’m going to offer myself as bread for the journey to people that are feeling even worse that day.

This old, old, old woman, probably the age I am now, but to me she was like [the actress] Jessica Tandy when I was 32, she said, “You take the action and the insight follows.” So the action is: I send money to the ACLU. I send money to our local public radio station. I’ll start writing postcards.

PAW: In Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, you wrote about how you’ve battled to overcome political hatred. Are you still able to find forgiveness?

AL: I have to notice that I’m the one that suffers with my lack of forgiveness. My pastor had quoted the great line of Dr. Martin Luther King’s, “Don’t let them get you to hate them.”

I realized that my hate was making me crazy and toxic. Little by little I could remember and see that Trump is a man who has never been loved, except by his daughter, who he has suggested he would be glad to date. I have seen the utter devastation of that man’s soul and heart. There’s just nothing left but this Eveready bunny of evil and narcissism and cruelty. I can feel moments for him. And that’s kind of a miracle.

Now, somebody could very easily say, well, what does that get you? Well, it helps me remember I’m not them. I’m the peace and love and compassion and generosity and all the values that he doesn’t have.

Some days are just too long, and it feels like they get the upper hand. Then I wake up again and I return myself back to this path. I go to the food pantry, not for the people at the food pantry, but for my own soul. I give beyond my sense of comfort. I give because that heals me, which leads naturally to optimism.

PAW: If you could speak to Trump’s supporters, what would you say?

AL: The willingness to change comes from the pain. The pain I was in at 31 and 32 for my drinking and using is what helped me change. The pain that Trump is causing MAGA is what is going to get people to change.

I would be together, really gladly. If I were with MAGA people, an action I can take is to get out Arlie [Russell] Hochschild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land, and give it to people. In Hochschild’s book, she went there, and she listened. She shared her experience, strength, and hope. She ate with them. Combed their little kids’ hair for them. She showed up. She sat on their porches. She heard their fear.

That book has been an action verb for me. I’d say, did you read this book? This book is really beautiful. I would love for you to read it, and then we’ll talk about it. We’ll have a meal together. And if you have a book that captures why you feel, why you hated Obama or why you hated Joe Biden or Hillary, I will read that and then let’s get together and let’s have a little book club of two or three. Bring your friends. Let’s just see where the Venn diagram unites us in our humanity.

PAW: You have a strong faith in God, that not all of us have. What would you say to readers who might ask how could a God allow such cruelty and injustice as what we are seeing now?

AL: Well, it seems to be in the natural course of human life here that we’re greedy, and terrified, and Cain is still killing Abel, and always will. Power breeds corruption. Both Trump and Netanyahu are trying to stay out of prison.

But every single wisdom tradition believes the exact same things: that we are here to do good, to help the poor. When we talk about God, we talk about goodness. We also talk about the great outdoors, G.O.D. It’s the Dalai Lama saying, “Kindness is my only religion.”

Look at how that family [that lost their child to cancer or a school shooting] was surrounded and lifted up, how they have come through one day at a time, how we sat there and listened while they cried, how we didn’t get them to try to stop crying, how we made food for them, how we donated to organizations that are there for kids with cancer; how we took the action and the insight followed.

At some point, life pulls you back to your feet. I always wish it were next Tuesday right after lunch. That’s not the system. Life gets very life-y, and then we show up, and we do what’s possible.

PAW: You’ve written that looking at the news is like crack cocaine. How do you take in the news and stay balanced?

AL: I wish I had a better answer than this, but I’m just a total news junkie. I’m reading everything. The best I can do is I leave for walks without my phone. I do turn off my phone when I meditate. I do as much as I can without my phone every day as a radical act. I turn it off when I’m writing.

I’m almost equally a proponent of radical self-care. So, all day, every day, I interrupt the toxic flow. We need to stay informed, too. So, where’s the balance there? How can we help?

PAW: What do you think that the media should do to bridge the divide between the left and the right?

AL: I just think that the awareness of the devastation Trump is doing to the people of America, to the poor, to the elders, to the middle class, to workers, to labor, to schools; it’s just happening.

I think that what we do is we report it rather calmly, and we keep people abreast of when the next rally will be.

We show up, and we beat our pans, and we gather together. It’s the only thing that has ever changed the political ruin that we find ourselves in. [It] is the gathering of more, and more, and more people to say this is not who we are. You know, it’s we the people believe in common decency and the common good and the commonweal.

We bring people to those rallies who have never been to a rally before, because being at that rally, I can always guarantee people it’s going to be the happiest they’ve been in weeks.