Anne Lamott charms Arts & Letters Live’s overflow crowd at First Presbyterian Dallas

by Catherine Cuellar

DALLAS — Never having met Anne Lamott, you feel like she's already your friend because her writing -- at once funny and poignant -- has the intimate authenticity of a friend on the phone rather than the academic tone of a professor. The quirky author's fiercely loyal fans quickly filled her Arts and Letters Live appearance in the sanctuary of First Presbyterian Dallas, with an overflow crowd watching via video remote. Lamott's enthusiastic audience Thursday laughed and cried in-person as they have reading her parenting memoir Operating Instructions, her guide to her craft Bird by Bird, and her personal Christian theology in Traveling Mercies, Plan B, and her latest, Grace (Eventually).

To call Lamott's sense of humor self-deprecating is an understatement. Describing herself as a "black belt codependent flight attendant to the world" since childhood, Lamott, who is 53, has transitioned from teaching writing at University of California-Davis to teaching Sunday school in a Presbyterian church. Her last three books describe her faith journey and her frustration with the religious right. After a brief reading, Lamott took her fans on a stream-of-consciousness tour of five brave things she's done in the past year that reveal her character, including a visiting her mother's birthplace of Liverpool and her boyfriend's native South Africa ("I don't believe in flying, conceptually"); getting a tattoo (the Rose of Sharon); enrolling in ballroom dance lessons ("Miracle-Gro on our character defects"); and starting a novel.

Then came the Q & A. When one audience member asked what Lamott would say to Ann Coulter, she responded, "The opposite of faith isn't doubt, it's certainty." Her advice to aspiring writers? "Carry a pen," always, because "that creative alive watchful witness is going to bloom." And despite feeling "just toxic" after three weeks of touring, Lamott indefatigably preached her own version of the gospel, which is central to her work: "God is crazy about you," "you're loved and chosen," and "perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor," to which even the cynical and jaded in attendance could say Amen.

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