Anne Lamott's Crooked Little Heart

Anne Lamott was bom in 1954 in Marin County, where she still lives, with her son Sam. Lamott is author of five novels and two nonfiction books. The latter — Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Sons First Year (1993) and Bird by Bird: Some Thoughts on Writing and Life (1995) — were bestsellers.

Crooked Little Heart, Pantheon Books, 1997; $24; 352 pages

Type: Novel

Time: Present

Place: Northern California

Lamott’s fifth novel brings back Rosie, the protagonist of Lamott’s 1983 Rosie. Rosie is 13 now. Her widowed mother is remarried; she’s stopped drinking. James, Rosie’s stepfather, is a goofy, sweet-hearted, mildly successful writer. Scrawny, flatchested Rosie and her best friend Simone, a nubile and lonely little sexpot, play doubles on the state tournament tennis circuit. Menace drifts into Rosie’s life in the form of an odd, shambling fellow named Luther, who follows Rosie from one tournament to another. Is Luther an “angel unawares” or a child molester?

Anne Lamott has always brought us characters who seem more born than made, who step off the page and mix in our lives. She has always managed to about tragedy with humor. She has always written spacious, lushly described passages. In Crooked Little Heart Lamott does brilliantly what she has always done well.

I had known that Lamott had played tournament tennis as a child. I asked how she got started.

“We belonged to what was called the Rec Center in Tiburon. It eventually became the Tiburon Peninsula Club. But it was sort of the club where the middle-class people that really populated Tiburon when I was a child played. The Belvedere Tennis Club was where you played if you were doing a lot better. And we couldn’t afford it. I eventually had a junior membership there just like Rosie does. It was where the rich kids played and where the better pro was. I started playing when I was about eight. I started taking club lessons, and 1 was always real athletic. I have a lot of physical skill. It’s odd, but that is true. I’m just really athletic. So I was really good. Really tiny and scrappy, and I could play all day. And did.

“1 did lessons, and it just sort of slowly became my life. We’d get there at nine and leave at five. There were three local tournaments. One at the Tiburon Club, one at the Belvedere Club, and one in San Rafael at Albert Park. I played. And I either won or I was runner-up in them, and I won doubles. I always loved doubles because I wasn’t so panic-stricken. Of course, doubles doesn’t count so much in America. Because in America you should do it alone and you shouldn’t enjoy it, which is sort of the story of my singles life.

“But I was really good at doubles because that was where I could play tennis. I was off and running. Once you’re showing aptitude people want to capitalize on it. So by 10 I was playing in a number of tournaments. And then by the time I was 11, I was playing the full-time tournament circuit, which starts with a few Easter tournaments and runs the entire summer. I was probably playing 20 tournaments a year. I spent about three summers on the tournament circuit.”

Lamott said that she still played tennis. “I play tennis on Wednesdays with an old friend who I used to play with when I was a kid. We don’t play sets. We bat the ball around. We talk about our kids. We talk about old times. But we mostly talk about our kids.”

Crooked Little Heart is Lamott’s first novel since 1989. I asked what it was like to write fiction after doing the two non-fiction books,

Lamott answered that she first started on Crooked Little Heart after she finished Operating Instructions. “I was in that difficult, beginning-a-novel stage of where you know it’s entirely hopeless. You’re full of self-loathing and know you can’t pull it off. You’re sick with all that blank paper. I just sat down and did it every day, but it wasn’t going that well. It was going well in the sense that I certainly knew who my characters were. And that’s a lot.

“Then I stopped, and I wrote Bird by Bird, and then of course there was this endless amount of touring with that. I toured for many months. So I found it very tough going. I had a wonderful editor at Pantheon named Robin Desser. She really coaxed this out of me and stuck it out. I wrote a lot of the usual awful first drafts that are three awful first drafts of the same book. And then I got a better draft together. It took so much longer than I thought it was going to. It was probably three years.

“And when I thought I was done I wasn’t. So we had to try to figure out a way to get me the energy and the stamina to go back in because I really wasn’t done or close. I did another full-fledged draft. Then we fine-tuned and filled in, flushed out for about six months. It felt scary and hard, and I felt somewhat intimidated by the fact that I'd written this book on writing. And I thought, Oh my God, all these critics are going to go, ‘You’re kidding, right?’

“The struggle was really with my own fear of being beaten up. But it was funny. You know there’s something so much harder, that takes so much more stamina about writing fiction. It’s more like a tightrope walk. You’re on the tightrope, and you have to focus in a way that you don’t have to when you’re just walking on a board that’s stretched out between two sawhorses. So it takes this gigantic amount of concentration. It required everything I could bring to it, and so that’s sort of exhausting in a muscular way and in a psychic way. But then at the same time, it puts you in that state where you’re bringing the very best that you have to offer and the very best concentration and sense of presence. Attentiveness I guess is what it is. '

“I loved working with Robin. It felt very collaborative. All my work feels collaborative. I have very brilliant friends. And I rely on them a lot. I let them into the process with me by begging them for help. I call people and I say, ‘I’m writing this scene about dumps and this is what I can remember. But there’s something I’m missing, I can’t figure it out. Will you just talk to me?’ They groan, ‘I’m working now.’ I plead, ‘Just talk to me for one minute.’ Then, they’ll get into it and stay with me on it. I always tell my writing students they should try to find interesting friends because you really need them. You can’t just come up with all this stuff by yourself. Or at least I can’t.”

I mentioned that I thought writing fiction demands a greater act of faith than writing nonfiction.

“Definitely. And a kind of foolishness. Which maybe is the same thing. You have to keep your head in the clouds and in the realm of imagination and spirit. These are all things that you can’t get to work for you on command. You’re always about to step off into complete disaster. But then if you have faith in either the process or the fact that it’s so fantastically worth it when all is said and done, then you end like Magoo, at the top of the skyscraper that’s under construction, where girders keep appearing underneath his feet.”

The Writing Center will host an evening with Anne Lamott on Monday, April 14, 7:00 p.m., in Chamberlain Hall on the campus of National University, 4085 Camino del Rio South. Writing Center members, $10; nonmembers, $12.