Addiction, motherhood and Jesus with writer Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott was nine years old, sitting in a one-room cabin on the California coast, watching her father try to help her older brother finish a semester-long research paper on birds that was due Monday morning. Her brother was crying. Her father put his arm around him and said, “Just take it bird by bird, buddy.” That phrase became the title of Lamott’s most famous book, and it has served for decades as a metaphor for how to start almost anything in life. “The American way is that you should always know what you’re doing,” Lamott says. “But the fact is that no writer knows what they’re doing until they’ve done it.”

Lamott, now 70, has written more than twenty books, mostly memoirs about addiction, single motherhood, faith, and forgiveness. In this conversation, she walks through the practical lessons she has learned about writing, recovery, parenting, and love—each grounded in a specific psychology of surrender, observation, and patience.

The writing process: showing up as the designated typist