We are so excited to be back for a second season of Wiser Than Me. I have been, and I really do mean this, truly blown away by the support that this show has received. We really do have a lot to learn from the glorious older women in our lives. To celebrate, I've got a super fun announcement to share with you. Wiser Than Me now has its very own merch. Yeah, merch. Our team has whipped up some items we think you're going to love. We're kicking off the collection with a beautiful Wiser Than Me crossbody tote bag that even has a zipper. Oh, sure, you think you've got enough tote bags? But if you get one more tote bag, a Wiser Than Me tote bag, you'll have room to buy so many more heads of organic lettuce at the Farmer's Market or to carry that second six-pack of Mountain Dew from your local 711, all while brushing your teeth with both hands because it's crossbody, hands-free, baby. What I'm saying is that this could be a life-changer, and this bag is made by Bagu, so it's super high quality, and it's beautiful design features some of my favorite words of wisdom from the show.

Head over to wiserthemeshop. Com and get two for yourself and then a bunch more for friends and family. And presto. Holiday shopping done early. Lemonada. Oh, aren't transitions hard? Maybe they're harder for some people than others, but I have to say for me, they are brutal. My parents divorced when I was really little, and I would go back and forth between my mother's family and my father's family on the old Eastern Airlines shuttle. And that was the granddaddy of all transitions for me. It was absolutely excruciating. But even run-of-the-mill transitions are rough, like going to college, for example. I remember having a moment of abject fear when my mom left me on my own with my 11 bags at Northwestern. Yeah, I brought 11 huge bags to college with me because I have always traveled very light, leaving people that I love separating, even happily separating. It's just heartrending for me. So recently, my parents moved from one place to a new place. And the new place is this just amazing, wonderful, cozy, cottage, senior living thing, which makes sense since my mom is 90 and my daddy Tom is 92. My sisters and I worked so hard to help them with that move.

Maybe we went overboard because we were involved in every design decision at the new place, hiring movers and contractors and picking colors and putting things away and organizing and saying this out loud right now. I think we might be helicopter children. But whatever, we got it done. I got to say, though, I was emotionally wrecked. There was a lot of anxiety about this move. Was it going to be smooth? Were they going to be happy? I was feeling a lot of, frankly, inexplicable separation anxiety. I haven't lived with my parents in basically half a century, so I'm not going to claim that any of this has any rational basis. But a couple of things happened during this move. So just to give you a little background, my sisters and I, when we were growing up, we lived near American University in Washington, DC. And they had, and still do have, an old clock tower there, and it would go off every hour. The dumb, dumb, dumb, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. You know that? Okay. So I'm at my parents' new place, helping them move in, and I'm putting boxes and keepsakes in a storage shed.

And this is very nostalgic stuff. It has almost a magical quality it's ephemeral from my parents, from our shared past. It's very emotional for me. And then all of a sudden, I hear this, dum, dum, dum, dum, somewhere close by. I don't even know where it is. And it's going off, and it's exactly the same tune. The sound of that, that sound, that was the sound of my childhood. And hearing it in that moment, all these years later. My God, it had this familiar, cozy, and at the same time, melancholic feeling to it. All right, so that happens. Then, after that, I go back from the storage shed to my parents' new cottage, and the number on their cottage is 3107. And it totally blew me away because the address number of our house in Washington in DC, where we grew up, was 3710. And look, to me, it was remarkable. Now, I know it's not the same number exactly, but it is the same four numerals. And this is a small coincidence, tiny even, but I look for these signs that happen all around us. For me, they confirm the mysteriousness of the world.

Isabel Iyande and I We talked about that last year, right? You don't have to be religious to believe that there is mystery in this life. So somehow the combination of those numbers being related to one another and the clock tower gonging, this synchronicity, it gave me a sense of real well-being, that something was at work here that felt correct, and that I was being reassured. This move from my mom and dad, which is a loaded thing, moving into probably what is their last house, this transition was eased by that synchronicity. We pick up little random artifacts in our lives: images, numbers, sounds, smells. Smells, my God. And each one marks a place in time. And we carry them forward with us. We bring them through our transitions. And when they bump into each other, there's a little comfort there. And sometimes a little comfort is a powerful thing. Anne Lamotte says that holy rollers see coincidences like the ones I just described as God working anonymously. And maybe she's right. I take some solace. I take a lot of solace in these kinds of life coincidences. I just love them. And so today, we're talking to Anne Lamotte.

Hi, I'm Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, and this is Wiser Than Me, the podcast where I get schooled by women who are wiser than me. And that really is what we do here. We We talk to smart, thoughtful, funny, accomplished, wise women. And today is no different, except, except I think it actually is a little different because today I'm talking to somebody who is professionally wise, right? I mean, what do you call somebody who is a spiritual and philosophical guide to millions of people? Somebody who's stock and trade is their ability to actually communicate wisdom and deliver her enlightenment. You call that a sage, right? So get ready, guys. Today, we're talking to an actual modern sage, and she's not a bullshit sage either. She's the real deal. Even her bon mots are secretly meaty. Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you. I love that. It's simple, right? Hardly. And you'll find a million things like that in Anne Lamotte's 20 books, 20, fiction and non-fiction. Her writing just has this incredible mix of raw transparency and humor that hits you right in the gut. The first book of hers that I read was Operating Instructions, which she wrote about the first year of her son's life, and which I read in the first year of my son's life.

And I guarantee you we're going to talk about that today because it was a game changer for me. Her straightforward, open, honest, daring approach to her work is just unique. She's not writing about easy stuff either. Her words on addiction, shaped by her own struggles, carry immense significance within the recovery community and have truly shifted perceptions on how we view sobriety and substance abuse. She's got one of those top to bottom amazing resumes, all kinds of awards in Guggenheim fellowships, fancy teaching positions, all these best sellers, plus meaningful, important essays published in meaningful, important places. Look, let's face it, she's perfect for this show, right? So I'm not going to waste any more time yaking away about Anne Lamotte because it's time to talk to Anne Lamotte. Hello, Anne Lamotte. I'm sorry that was so long. That went on forever. Apologies. Hi.

Hello, love. I could listen to that all day.

I'm happy to read it all over again if you want me to.

Okay, that'd be great. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Julia Lourdes. No, I'm kidding. So are you Are you comfortable if we share your real age? Yeah. And what is your real age?

My real age is 70. I'm a very young 70, though, except for physically and cognitively.

So how old do you feel?

I feel that I'm 47, except for my body, which things are deteriorating slowly. My feet and my hip hurt. So some mornings I wake up and I limp around like Walter Brennan. But your inside person doesn't age, right? Right. Your inside person is all the ages you've ever been and will be and shall be forevermore. And so I trust my inside age more than the physical.

Hey, can I ask Is there a question about your feet?

Yes.

We'll edit this part out, but what part of your feet are hurting?

Because I'm having this issue. Oh, I don't think you should edit this out. I think I have had planters off and on in my arch. Most people get it in their heel, but my arch hurts. I really limped. I was limping. It's getting better. But here's the thing. You have to do what the doctor says, which I don't like to do. But what they say is you stay off it for a while. But I'm a little neurotic because I've also had a lifelong eating disorder. So I feel that if you don't get 10,000 steps a day, you can't tell where you're going to end up. So I would always get my steps. And coincidentally, my feet wouldn't get better. And so this is funny. My husband and I were in Cuba in the spring, and my feet hurt. But I had been in this Cuban church, and I was by myself, and I stopped suddenly, and I said to myself, What if I do what they say? And it was so I found, I wrote it down because I never do what they say. I do reform what they say, right? So they say, Stay off of it for a month.

And I think, Well, I'll do half as much walking for a month. And I started doing what they say, and my feet are so much better. But what helps is if you have... Where do your feet hurt?

Well, it's the top of my foot.

The top of it?

That's funny. Yeah, it's like... I mean, I don't know if you can see, but see?

Yeah, I can see. Right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I don't know what's going on. After we do this podcast, I'm going to call my doctor.

Yeah, and then you have to do what they say. You have to do what they say.

I'm going to do what he says.

And have you tried icing it?

No, I haven't tried anything.

Okay, here's what you do. You do the rice diet, you rest it, you ice it, You use a compression. Get a brace, one of those elastic braces at CVS, and you elevate it. And do that for a few days and it'll be better. You also need to take Advil for the inflammation, if you ask me.

And do you take insurance?

I do. Yes, perfect. I take most insurance.

Great. Well, I hope you take mine because I'd really rather not pay for this out of network. Hi, guys. Julia here. Okay, I just want to give you a quick update in case you were concerned. I did go to the doctor after we recorded this podcast and he diagnosed this problem as tendonitis. He said that under no circumstances should I be icing the area. Yeah, Dr. Lamont's advice was ill-advised, and I'm actually considering a malpractice suit of sorts. But anyway, I still love her. I guess the next question I was going to ask you is, what's the best part about being your age? I might answer it for you. I I think giving medical advice to people might be one of your best things about being your age. Do you agree with me about that?

Being my age means that everything is hurt at one point or another. I know what to do for a lot of different ailments. Yes. One of the things about being 70 is that everything has happened at least once, almost everything. Like you, I know you're very young, but- No, not really. Medium.

Medium young.

You're medium young. By a certain age, we have all had unsurvivable losses, right? Oh, boy. Right? And I know how you come through them. I know it helps, and I know it doesn't help. Little nice Christian bumper stickers don't help, that God never gives you more to carry, blah, blah, blah. What a crock. Bumper stickers and platitudes don't work. What works when somebody's going through unsurvivable losses, that you show up and you sit with them and you are willing to feel like shit with them, and you don't try to get them to feel any better than they do for as long as it takes them. It could be years. Some losses we never recover from, but it's like having a badly broken leg where it heals, but you dance again, but with a limp. Yes. And so I know what people... I know what life has to offer, and I no longer think that it's anything like in the movies or the ads. I know you don't buy it, rent it, lease it, achieve it. It's an inside job, and it has to do with the inner healing of the spirit. And it has to do with having people that are not trying to get you to be a different person than you are or feel any differently than you are who look at you and say, God, I get it.

Me too. I've been there. Can I get you a cup of tea? Do you want to put your feet up in my lap?

I had cancer a few years back, and that was my experience, too. I had a group of friends who would show up in that way, even just to sit there. They didn't have to talk. I found that to be very comforting. They weren't saying things like, What can I do? Which is exhausting. It was just being there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so let's talk about your wonderful husband, Neil. You got married in 2019, right?

Yes, I got married three days after I started getting Medicare. Okay. Why?

Social Security. Why? I want to know why you decided, not because I don't think you should have, by the way. That sounded aggressive. I didn't mean to. Why did you decide to get married at 65?

We've been living together for a few years, and he's really lovely, and he changed my life. And on our third date, he taught me about this inner critic work. I call it KFKD. I don't know if we can say that word on your part.

We can. Oh, absolutely.

In Bird by Bird, I call it K-Fucked Radio. And it's that sing in stereo that out of the right-hand speaker says, Oh, you're different than, you're better than, you're certainly more humble than. And then out of the left-hand speaker, it just says, You're a fraud, and that the jig is up and talk about beating a dead horse, and if people really got to know you too well, they'd run screaming for your cute little life. And he taught me to isolate this voice of KFucked Radio and to talk to it. And he taught me to say, Oh, it's just you. And then to help it figure out somewhere else to go while I get that day's work done. And as soon as he taught me that, I thought, This guy as a keeper.

Yeah, I love it. Talk about falling in love and how it felt falling in love in your '60s. If there is a difference between falling in love in your '60s versus in your '20s, in your '30s, Is there?

Well, we're different people. We're a little bit wiser. When we hit the first date, I had come there anxious and uptight and guilty and full of shame. And I was instantly had a lot of relief. And so I thought, Yo. And then we were jamming. We were just jamming the way you do with your best girlfriend. And I had always held out for being with a man who I would want to be best friends with if it was a woman. And And before then, I had often been with men that I loved or I was addicted to or I liked to be with, but that wouldn't have been my best girlfriend. And Neil would have been because he's so real and so honest and so just funny. And so on about the third or fourth date, when I realized we were going to be talking for the rest of our life, I said, I want to keep this in the soda shop stage for a while. And we did. And when you're 40, 50, 30, you don't. It's like you immediately have all this adrenaline, and you have this energetic trance with the person when you start to...

And it's like the vampire dance floor. It gets very smoky and a little bit of strobe light and you get out there and it's like so much adrenaline.

You're getting down with the get down.

You're getting down and you get so much adrenaline and you get the endorphin. So it's like a speedball. And I thought, I've been sober, clean and sober 37 years. Bravo. And I don't want to get stoned on anything anymore, except for maybe nature. And so we did. We got to know each other for a few weeks, and it was very different, and it was really fun.

I know that in your book, in your And that's right, in the new book, I have all these books you've written. I'm surrounded by your books right now. And Neil said that 80 % of everything that is true and beautiful can be experienced on any 10-minute walk. I love that. I love I love it, and I believe it's true. And I think I also might be in love with Neil. I think I've also fallen in. I hope you don't mind.

No, no.

What have you learned since you've gotten married? What have you learned about yourself, Anne. Anne or Annie? Can I call you Annie?

And call me Annie. Yeah, everyone calls me Annie. I've just learned that... I wrote in Bird by Bird that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. It's the voice of the enemy. I grew up with a lot of shame. I grew up with pretty unhappy parents who were married, 27 unhappy years. I grew up looking very, very... Let's talk about shame later, too. It's my favorite topic. But I grew up with this crazy kinky hair, and I got bullied a lot, and people threw stuff at boys, threw stuff at me. It was very crazy. So that my solution and something my parents encouraged was the perfectionism. I was always the best in my class. I I was a tennis champion, and it will make you sicker and more mentally ill and crazier than any other quality. I learned little by little with Neil, and then definitely after marriage, where, let's face it, I was stuck with him. I learned that life is just very messy and it's very real. The miracle of being older is that you might go to the same default places. Mine is this victimized this self-righteousness and this weaponized silence. But you move through it in two or three hours instead of months, and in one case, an entire decade, and that you know that you're going to come through.

You know that the problem is mental. But so I remember it's not them. It's like it's an inside job. I can choose serenity. I can pray for peace of mind. I can pray to not be an asshole. Yeah.

Amen to that. So tell me, though, what was it like to have Neil enter your life with your family?

Well, Sam is very used to me being there for him and Jack's. And so there were Just a tiny, tiny bit of resistance to Neil. Sam has never been all that excited about long-term boyfriends. But with Neil and with Jack, Jack liked him. He's great with kids. He's a bunch of kids of his own. And so Jax was fine. It's just like the mobile in that old John Bradshaw family system's mobile, where one thing happens, a person gets sober, and all the figures on the mobile start to move again, and sometimes the strings get caught up in each other. And it was like that for a while. It sorts itself out, but it's really lovely.

Yeah. I would be remiss if I didn't tell you how important operating instructions was to me personally. Wow. Thank you. It really was, Annie, because my, actually both of my kids, but my first son had colic, and I had- Same, yeah.

I know.

I just reread it, and I was reliving it, and it was so difficult. I, of course, thought it was because of me and my bad mothering or bad something. You would talk about shame, right? And there was a me too part of that book comforted me away from all of it. And there was a quote that I pulled. Where is it? Yeah. My heart is so huge with love. I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time, I feel that he has completely ruined my life.

Yeah. And I know. It's like all truth is paradox. And I would feel like I literally would sacrifice my life for him. And then I'd look over and think of him raising his ugly reptilian head. And then there's a part, I don't know if you remember it, where the colic was so bad. And I just thought casually about bundling him up and putting him on the porch for the night. So I could get one night's sleep. And every mother, worth her weight and salt, said me too. Oh, yes. And you're not supposed to say that.

You're not You weren't supposed to say it. There was so much you weren't supposed to say that had to be said in that book. It was critical. It was urgent that it was said. And it is such a shock to have a child in so many ways, in the most beautiful of ways, and in the most difficult of ways, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I wrote a follow-up to operating instructions because Sam had a baby at 19, Jack. And I wrote a book called Some Assembly Required. And I think if I had to go to a desert island, it's a book I would take because, spiritually, the toughest stuff I ever did was to have to let go of my son and to let him be the parent. Because I'm sure you're not like this with your children, but I think I have excellent ideas for them.

Oh, yes. I think I do, too, by the way.

Right. In all areas of their life. I finally heard someone say that help is the sunny side of control, but I didn't hear it in time for when Sam had an infant That is great.

Can you just describe the difference, if there is one?

Yeah. When you're a mom, they don't leave. When you're a grandma, they all leave at some point. Right. And that's a blessing. And also when you're a grandmother, you're older. I was a young grandmother. I was 55. But when Sam called me the night before Thanksgiving in 2018 and said he was going to be a father. Of course, I had 25 people coming, and it was not on my bingo card. It was not what my plan for him was. College was the plan and a little tiny, tiny bit of a career. That would be so much skin off his nose. And so I was young. And Sam was a mess. He was a mess head and an alcoholic. And so because I'm a black belt codependent, I also thought that what he What he should do next was to get sober and so on and so forth. What he should do after that was to this and what he should do after that. And I had all these plans. And some assembly required just so much about how the more you offer your plans for your children, the more they need to resist you because you're crazy.

And I really would. Sam is 34 now. And without my recovery program and a lot of therapy, I would be running alongside him on his hero's journey with Capri Sun and lip balm and sunscreen. And that's an insult. That's disrespectful, and it injures him, and it injures me. But it injures our children to try to control them. So this book, Some Assembly, is where I learned pretty much most days to stop trying to control them.

So you could have called it just Shut the Fuck Up and Sit Down, right? I mean...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a great acronym in recovery for people with tiny, tiny control issues. And it's, wait, W-A-I-T, why am I talking? And so I just sit there quietly and I think, I'm not going to compare, I'm not going to correct, I'm not going to complain. I'm just going to love these people. Just love them, love them, love them, and stay quiet.

It sounds like you've gotten better at it as time has gone on, correct?

You get better. I mean, it's like learning to play a pickleball or a piano or something. You start off really badly and you take the action and the insight follows. The action might be not saying what you thought, what was on your tongue to say, and instead just gently stroking your shoulder and saying, Quietly to yourself, it's okay, honey. Why don't we get us a nice cup of tea until we settle? And then, yeah, you get better.

There is something about being a mom and having that focus and that grounding that is When it's working well, it really takes you out of yourself. Yeah. And that is one of the many blessings of being a mother, I think.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah.

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Yeah. Well, okay. Anyway, when I was coming up in California, in fourth grade, you wrote your first term papers. Yes. And you have to do a bird paper. And so my older brother hated school and wasn't very good at it because he didn't care. And he had his bird paper, and you have the whole semester to do that. And it was due the next day. This was a Sunday, and it was due on Monday. And he hadn't started. He couldn't start. It was too much. Like any writing project How did you start, it's like an unassaulted ice flow. He was in tears. My older brother was a tough guy. He was a tough fourth grader. My dad, who was a writer, sat down with him and put his arm around him and said, Just take it bird by bird, buddy. And he taught him to read a little bit about Chiquities, for instance. And then in his own words, which is the only way you can share what's inside of you to share with us, you write, Tell us about Chiquities, and then find an illustration. Okay, next we're going I do Great Blue Herons.

I want you to read a couple of pages of audibon on Great Blue Herons, and then I want you to tell me in your own words about Great Blue Herons. So that's where it comes from.

Oh, I love it so much. It's such a beautiful expression, in fact. My son had a teacher. It's not quite as beautiful, but she used to say when he would get overwhelmed, she would say, Just break it down into manageable parts, which is exactly what your dad was saying. Yeah, yeah. Of course, you're known for your talks and your teachings on writing. Two things that you said really struck me. One was the act of writing turns out to be its own reward, and publication is something you have to recover from.

Yeah, yeah.

And I I'm so struck by that, Annie, because you could really apply that to many things.

Everything.

It certainly is applicable to acting and producing and editing a film or a television show or anything, crunching it, crunching it, crunching it down. I was amazed at how universal those teachings are of yours.

Oh, well, thank you. Well, the publication, it's at American Fixation mission that what you seek is outside of you. That's right. And it's a perfectionism. And E. L. D. D.ra, the great novelist, Rags Time and Book of Daniel. Of course. He said in Vanity Fair, 20 years ago, he said, Riding is like driving at night with the headlights on. You can only see a little ways in front of you, but you can make the whole journey that way. And that is the truest thing I know, whether it's about what you're working on, your production stuff, your creation stuff, or your spiritual life, being a mother, having a colicky baby. It's like driving at night with the headlights on, and you can only see a little ways, but you can make the whole journey that way. It's hard. Some days are so hard. And one of the acronyms for shame in recovery is should have already mastered everything. And the terrible feeling you have when you haven't, when you have a colicky baby, when you have a very old parent. How could we know this stuff? But we think we're supposed to, right?

I know. And that reminds me of the piece that I read that you recently wrote in the Washington Post about the beauty, I'm going to say, the grace of not knowing. I don't know. How could you know? That really resonated with me. We think we have to know that getting the answer is what you're striving for, but maybe living in the unknowing is its own blessing.

Yeah. My mom had Alzheimer's, and she was living an independent living, but falling apart. And so my brothers and I were just trying to manage it all. And she also had diabetes, and she'd sneak over to Safeway and steal bread and cookies, and the cashiers would pay for it because she was such a lovable person. And so we had this nurse, and my brothers and I were with her, and we said, Oh, we don't know what we're doing. We don't know how much longer she can... We don't know how to get her to stop eating the carbs and the sugar, and we don't know if she's even doing the insulin. And we went on and on just in that grief, but also that self-doubt, that toxic self-doubt. And this gentle, gentle nurse looked at us and she said, How could you know? And that literally hadn't occurred to us.

Well, that is incredible.

How could you know?

How could you know? And just so you know, at Thanksgiving this year, or this past Thanksgiving, I should say, I referenced that in a toast that I made to our family because we So thank you for sharing that as I start to cry. But the reason being is because we've got a lot of family stuff, people getting older, people are struggling with health in our family, different people. And so it's forgiving your sofa not knowing and being comfortable with not knowing is an okay place to be.

And I think it's gorgeous. It's not only okay, it's the portal. It's the opening to something more spacious and more expansive where there might be grace and there might be fresh air instead of going over and over and over again, your ideas and your plans, none of which work.

Can you talk about how your writing changed after you got sober, Annie?

Oh, my God. Let's see, I got sober when I was 32. I had published three books. I'm born and raised in the same county I still live in, so I was loved out of all sense or proportion. And I just thought... I mean, my insights were like Swiss cheese from the bulimia, and I was addict and an alcoholic and all that. And I got sober July seventh, and I didn't think I'd be able to write again, because certainly, what you learn is the writers you love most are alcoholics. Is this true?

Really?

No. But I was raised by a writer. He was an alcoholic. His friends were alcoholics. I was going to say. Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Shirley Jackson and Dorothy Parker. And all the writers I loved most were very severe alcoholics. But anyway, I didn't know if I'd write again. And that bad voice said, Well, that's that. You can either get sober or you can keep on being a writer. And I decided to get sober because I thought I was going to die otherwise. And this guy said to me when I first got sober, he said, At the end of my drinking, I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards. And I had gotten there. I had no more good ideas. So I stopped drinking. And for a while, nine months, just like what it takes to have a baby, I didn't think I could write. And my friends and the sober women said, Don't worry about it. Go to a meeting. Do you need a meet? Do you need a ride? Do you want to have coffee? Come with me. I'm coming over. And I'd say, No, no, don't come over. Don't come over.

They'd say, I'm coming over because your mind is a bad neighborhood and you shouldn't be in it alone. And they'd come over. And so I wrote my first book, my novel, which is called All New People, which is in many ways, I think, the best thing I've ever written, but It was the first thing I wrote sober. And I've had this strange feeling one day that this story was inside of me, and I felt that it had come and was tugging on the sleeve of my sweater, and it was trusting me to get it right, finally, because I wasn't drunk. I didn't think I could write without it. And it tugged on my sleeve and it said, Bird by bird. I always had my writing students get one-inch picture frames or two-inch picture frames, give them to each other to remember, you just I have to do that one passage that you can see through the one-inch picture frame, that one scene. That's all you have to do today. So I started doing that. I started slowly doing what I've always told my writing students. And you do it badly. You do shitty first draps, and then you do a better second first trap, and then you do a really decent second trap and give it to someone to read.

So it was really slow. It's a long road back. And I did it one day at a time with a lot of help, with very profound people along the way.

I am in awe of the courage that that took. I just admire you so tremendously, and I really I have a sister who, unfortunately, died of a drug overdose, and I really wish I could have gotten you and your people together with her because I think... Well, anyway, it is what it is. But I do admire you. I'm in awe of the strength that that took and the power that that took. That's a lot of power.

That's a lot. It's a lot of help, too. And if you ever said to me, Annie, I need you to go to New York or Chicago because I have a niece and we're afraid she's going to die, and I want you to spend a couple of days just having walks with her. I would go as God as my witness. I'm a Sunday school teacher, and I mean it, I'd go like that. Because that's what the women That's what the sober women did for me. They said, there's literally nothing, no way that you need help, that I won't try to get you that help. Angels.

Angels.

Angels. Angels.

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Go to airbnb. Com/host. By the way, on the first season of this show, our first guest was Jane Fonda. I love her.

I love her.

Love her. She loves you, and she quoted you. She quoted you. She said, No is a complete sentence, as Anne Lamotte said. And here's the incredible thing. At the end of the season, our final guest was Carol Burnet. And she quoted you, too.

No way.

I swear to God. No way.

Yeah. Oh, my God. I have to write that down.

Isn't that cool?

Yes. Yeah. Wow. Love that.

Which is a fabulous expression. It's It's a fabulous idea. But also, I get the sense that you're a yes person, that you're somebody who said yes to a lot of things in life. I do. Is that right? I mean, you teach Sunday school, you're church, you write, You're in the recovery community. You take care of your grandson. So what are you saying no to? Because it seems to me you're really saying yes a lot, which I also admire.

Well, I say no to things that I really don't want to do. I say no to things that I'm only I used to agree to do so people would like me more because before recovery, I got all of my value from how other people thought about me. And if I was of value to other people, then I felt that I was a person of value. But I say no now to stuff that is just damaging to me. I do, as an older woman, have less energy than I used to. And so I say no to trips, even if they pay well, if there's not a nonstop. I don't want to do that anymore. And so I say no to a lot more things that people ask me to do because you know what I want to do? I want to be at home. I want to be in my funny little town. I want to be with the people that I have, my spiritual and walking and pickleball life and Sam and Jack and Neil and the Kitty and the Dogs. I just want to... A lot of the striving. But it's a huge change as you get older is that the striving really quiets down Oh, interesting.

And the being grows, the longing for the being. You know what E. E. Cummings called the human merely being instead of the human doing and the impressing people and moving my numbers up. The striving is just organically quieted down for every single person I know. The pond of the striving settles down and you think, well, I Let me give you an image. In the Hebrew Bible, the famous Psalm 23, that ends, My cup runneth over. Before recovery and before I got older, it's like I had this cup, this chalice, and I ran around trying to get everybody's overflow because I had such shaky self-esteem and such a raging ego, this terrible ping-pong game going on. And as you get older, you stop running around trying to get other people's leftovers, and you start letting your own cup be filled up with that that really hydrates and nurtures you and fills your cup with love and sweet memories. You start making sweet memories instead of working on your flabby thaws.

And I think another thing that you talk about in your writing is breathing, which also resonates with me because there have been moments in my life where everything feels like it's so bad that you can't escape it. You can't get your head away from it. It feels like you physically cannot escape. And in those moments, I have found that if I can just remind myself that I can still breathe, I'm still able to get breath. So I'm not Even though it feels like I'm suffocating, I can breathe.

You could put your hand on your tummy and just breathe into your hand.

Just breathe. Yeah.

But I'll tell you the most perfect breathing mantra and exercise I know. I have It's tape to my bathroom. That's how you know it's important. It's Thich Nath Han, who just died maybe a year ago. But he has this mantra, an exercise, and he says, breathing in, I calm myself. You take a deep breath, breathing in, I calm myself. And then breathing out, I smile. And it's not a big, phony smile. It's a tiniest smile, like Mona Lisa, or just a tiny smile of, Oh, thank God, I'm breathing again. And you do that for three minutes. You go, breathing in, I call myself. Oh, breathing out, I smile. And it breaks the trance. It breaks that terrible hook into your mind that is spinning like the rat exercise wheel. And I promise you, it connects you umbilically to something beautiful and outside, outside, surrounding and ind dwelling us. But you do three minutes.

I'm totally doing that. I love it. And it's not like a 20-minute meditation. You can get it done in three minutes and get on with it. I love it. Okay. We've run out of time, of course, which is a bummer because I could talk to you forever, although I'm sure you have a million other things to do. Let me ask you a couple of really quick questions that we end with, if that's all right. Sure. Is there something you go back and tell yourself at 21?

Oh, wow. I would tell myself, you are so beautiful as is. You don't need to change a thing. You don't need to worry about your hair or what your butt looks like. You don't need to worry about anything inside of you. This is an inside job. That's what I tell my Sunday school kids. It's an inside job. You are loved and chosen as is. And I would have said, there is nothing that any man out there can ever say to you or think about you that matters an angstrom unit. It is not out there. It is not what they think is of value in a person. What is a value in a person is what you learned at those women's meetings. What you learned is that all of your feelings are okay. It's okay to be mad. It's okay to feel really ugly inside. It's going to heal you, your anger. And it's okay to be grief struck. When I was coming up in the '50s, women couldn't be angry or grief struck. They were exiled. They were either institutionalized or divorced. And then the men all got cute new 15-year-old wives. Right. And so I would say, all of that stuff inside of you is the way home.

Talk to another person about it. Talk to an older woman about it. And I think that's probably the most important thing that I would have said is that we're starting over. We We're starting over as of now, and this is a new page. And from now on, it's what we think about us that we're going to go by.

Oh, I love that. And I'm not going to ask you one more question because that is just the perfect wisdom to end this conversation on. I just am in awe of you, and I thank you for being here today. You are such a dreamboat. You are a positive dreamboat.

Thank you, love.

Oh, that was so much good stuff. I got to get my mom on Zoom and process all of this. Hi, mommy. Hi, sweet. Okay, so today we had the great pleasure of talking to Annie Lamotte. I know you're a fan of her work.

Absolutely.

She's 70. I was asking her about, because she's a grandma, the difference between being a mom and a grandma. She was saying, The thing about being a mom is that they never leave. What's your take on that? How would you characterize the difference in the mother relationship versus the grandmother relationship? For our listeners, my mom has three daughters, myself included, and then five grandchildren.

Parenting requires... It's a big responsibility, and you have all kinds of worries and so forth. But with your grandchildren, there's a sheer joy because, as she says, they go home at night. In other words, it's like taking care of somebody else's garden, but it's their garden to really tend. That releases you from the worry and the tension of being a parent, and you have the sheer joy of everything from their first immersion, for the first time you see them coming out with a little wet hair. All the things along the way, it's not that you don't have any worries about them, but compared to being a parent, it's just like having the sheer joy of every moment that you're with them is because you know that you're not the final vote.

Well, I think that that makes complete sense, and that's something to look forward to. She was saying that in terms of her parenting, she's somebody who really wants to fix things and get in there and offer her help. She said, And the more that she tried in the past to offer help, the more resistance she got from her son. There's this acronym called WAIT. I think it's something from AA that she falls back to a lot, and it stands for Why am I talking?

That's so good.

Yeah, it's a good one. That's a good one. Why am I talking?

I think that's very interesting. To turn it on its side, I would say that you girls have helped us move into this place that we've come to, and you've done so many things and so many things. I was talking to your sister today, and I was talking about something that doesn't work. She said, Oh, I'll call and I'll take care of that. I said, Listen, you're so wonderful, but it makes me weak if you are going to do all all of the... I mean, it's time for me to start the struggle and do the adjusting here. If somebody else is always coming in to save you and to save you from struggle and so forth, it makes you weak.

Right.

Or if you give in to that. I think that's interesting that I felt that at this age.

Yeah. Isn't that funny? We felt the need to get in there and help and make decisions for you and Daddy. It's a real role reversal.

It's a complete role reversal. But also, it's one that is... You have to worry the same way you worry about over-parenting.

Right. So I've over-parented you is what's happened. I'm not saying that. You are a little. But that's okay. I get what you mean. I totally get it.

Well, it was interesting just being with you and your sisters and having all these decisions. That we're... And so forth. And by the way, it's critical because we're old and the move was very difficult for us at this age. So it was essential That you guys do that. But also it's essential now that we take charge of ourselves and of our situation.

Yes.

Remember, we got tied, a big thing of tied, and I'm trying to do a laundry today and I couldn't find it. I was going to call and say, Where did you put the tied?

Did you find it?

I opened up looking for some toothpaste, and I found it.

Good for you, Mama.

I know. I felt like a huge success. I got my PhD.

You got your PhD in life. Okay, Mom, I love you so much. Have fun in your new digs.

Oh, thanks, honey. And thanks for helping me with my new digs.

You're welcome.

I love you.

Call me if you need to find things. I'll find them for you. There's more Wiser Than Me with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content from each episode of the show. Subscribe now in Apple Podcasts. Make sure you're following Wiser Than Me on social media. We're on Instagram and TikTok at Wiser Than Me. We're on Facebook at Wiser Than Me podcast. Wiser Than Me is a production of Lemonada Media, created and hosted by me, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. This show is produced by Chrissy Peace, Jamila Zaraa-Williams, Alex McOwen, and Oja Lopez. Brad Hall is a consulting producer. Rachel Neil is VP of New Content, and our SVP of Weekly Content and Production is Steve Nelson. Executive producers are Paula Kaplin, Stephanie Widdles-Wax, Jessica Cordova-Kramer, and me. The show is mixed by Johnny Vince Evans with engineering help from James Barber. Our music was written by Henry Hall, who you can also find on Spotify or wherever you listen to your music. Special thanks to Will Schlegel and, of course, my mother, Judith Bowles. Follow Wiser Than Me wherever you get your podcast. If there's a wise old lady in your life, listen up. This episode of Wiser Than Me is brought to you by Maker's Mark.

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