Last summer I wrote about how pathetic I am around famous men and women and how I usually clam up when I'm in the presence of celebrity. This is especially true of writers I admire. Blame it on all those years in New York, where accosting celebrities in public is considered extremely uncool and something only pathetic tourists would do. (Hence why I never spoke to Susan Sarandon, Spike Lee, and John F. Kennedy Jr., among others.)
The one time I met Anne Lamott, however, I found her to be as wonderfully quirky in person as she is in her writing.
We were at the same writing conference where I met Frank McCourt and Sharon Olds. Anne was on my flight coming in for the conference, the only white woman with dreadlocks on the plane, and yet still I wasn't 100 percent sure it was her at first. (I was, however, sure I recognized W.S. Merwin, who rode with B and I to the hotel from the airport. Topic of conversation: why he and his wife had so much luggage. Turns out they were returning from an extended trip to Hawaii.)
We were invited to a dinner at Hemingway's house in Sun Valley, and at the dinner we were seated at the table with some of the other fellows (read: poor post-MFA students without a book published yet who were there by the good graces of the conference) and had a chance to chat with Anne and her boyfriend at the time, a man with the coolest name I've ever heard. They were both lovely. I felt a little bolder and told her how much I liked Bird by Bird and said I'd made my students read it. I still make my students read it.
The next day we were given the option of several outdoorsy activities, and B and I and our friends Steve and Leann, who were also there as fellows, decided to brave the whitewater rafting trip. The van drive took about twelve or fifteen of us an hour out into the mountains around the Salmon River, where we donned life vests and had a brief lesson in rafting, and then hit the water.
Anne and her boyfriend went in ahead of us, and every time we came around the corner, she'd call out, "The interns are coming! Look, here are the interns!"
Now every time I think of Anne Lamott, I remember the sound of her voice. There was something both mocking and tender about it, as if she were keeping track of us because we were too young and clueless to look after ourselves. I remember the glee with which she shouted after us, her
dreadlocks bobbing up and down as the raft carried us all downriver.