Laughter, even at my own quirky, fearful, darling self—laughter, I’ve written in a number of places, is carbonated holiness. So if I’m breathing and I’ve gotten my sense of humor back, I’m in something spiritual.
Anne Lamott
Humor and Laughter
Topic: Joy & Happiness
For me to do what I call the sacrament of ploppage and sit down for one minute to breathe into my heart cave and do the sighing, I get my sense of humor back. And laughter, even at my own quirky, fearful, darling self—laughter, I’ve written in a number of places, is carbonated holiness. So if I’m breathing and I’ve gotten my sense of humor back, I’m in something spiritual, I am something that has to do with my human spirit and the divine.
Anne Lamott, born April 10, 1954, in San Francisco, California, United States, is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, essayist, and memoirist known for blending sharp humor with honest reflections on faith and everyday struggle. Her books draw on her own life, including experiences with alcoholism, single motherhood, depression, and a candid, sometimes irreverent Christianity. Based in Marin County, California, Anne Lamott is also a progressive political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher whose work has reached readers well beyond the literary world.
Anne Lamott grew up in a literary household; her father, Kenneth Lamott, was a writer, and her mother, Dorothy Lamott, was an attorney. She attended Drew School in San Francisco and later studied at Goucher College in Maryland, where she wrote for the college newspaper before returning to California. Her first published novel, Hard Laughter (1980), written for her father after his brain cancer diagnosis, set the pattern for much of her work: unsentimental, often funny, and rooted in the real pressures of family and illness. In the decades that followed, she published both fiction and nonfiction, including Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, Help, Thanks, Wow, and Dusk, Night, Dawn, where she continues to explore writing, spirituality, and the practice of hope.
Anne Lamott’s public life has unfolded alongside her writing. Her career and teaching were profiled in the 1999 documentary Bird by Bird with Annie: A Film Portrait of Writer Anne Lamott. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2010. She has contributed essays to Salon and other outlets and has described books as “medicine” that tell the truth about “human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness—and that can make me laugh.” In her personal life, she has one son, Sam (born 1989), a grandson, Jax (born 2009), and, in April 2019, she married writer Neal Allen. Through this mix of family story, spiritual searching, and steady, often humorous candor, Anne Lamott has become a trusted voice for readers learning to live honestly with both their wounds and their faith.
Lamott, Anne. “Anne Lamott — Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Much More.” The Tim Ferriss Show, episode transcript, 15 July 2021, tim.blog/2021/07/15/anne-lamott-transcript.
Anne Lamott
Theme: Humor
About This Anne Lamott Quotation [Commentary]
Anne Lamott’s words begin with a disarming honesty: “laughter, even at my own quirky, fearful, darling self.” She does not laugh at some ideal version of herself, but at the real person she is, with all her worries and oddities. When she says that this laughter “is carbonated holiness,” she is naming a kind of joy that bubbles up right in the middle of ordinary insecurity. If she is “breathing” and has “gotten my sense of humor back,” she knows she is “in something spiritual,” not because life has become easy, but because her heart has softened enough to see herself with kindness.
From there, Anne Lamott speaks of “dual citizenship.” We are “children of the divine or children, sons and daughters of God,” and at the same time people with “screwed up biographical details” and “genetic details that we would have maybe not preferred.” She lists her own: predispositions, age, work, activism, mothering and grandmothering, even the fact that she “got married at 65” and “three days after I got Medicare.” Her humor holds all this together. Laughter at her “quirky, fearful, darling self” allows her to remember that she is both a person with a complicated story and “a person of spirit.”
For Anne Lamott, to be “spiritually fit” is to remember that she is not “this terrible pinball machine in my mind, cranking out new ideas about how I can do life more perfectly so that everybody will think more highly of me.” When she pauses, breathes, and notices that her sense of humor has returned, she recognizes that she is already “in something spiritual,” already living as a child of God in the middle of her actual life. Her description of laughter as “carbonated holiness” suggests that whenever people can smile gently at their own quirky, fearful, darling selves, they are tasting something of that same holiness too.
Anne Lamott’s Conversation with Tim Ferris [Context Passage Excerpt]
And so breathing will bring you into your body, so for that reason, you may resist it. But for me to do what I call the sacrament of ploppage and to sit down for one minute to breathe into my heart cave and do the sighing, I get my sense of humor back. And laughter, even at my own quirky, fearful, darling self, laughter, I’ve written in a number of places, is carbonated holiness. So if I’m breathing and I’ve gotten my sense of humor back, I’m in something spiritual, I am something that has to do with my human spirit and the divine.
I mean, I believe, and I’ve heard, that we have dual citizenship. We’re children of the divine or children, sons and daughters of God. And we also have these kind of screwed up biographical details. We’ve got genetic details that we would have maybe not preferred. We have predispositions to alcoholism and mental illness or to weight gain in our thighs or whatever. But I have to remember that I can toggle back between dual citizenship, between being a child of God or of the great universal spirit, and Annie Lamont, 67, Sunday school teacher and left-wing activist, mother and grandmother. And, I got married at 65. I got married three days after I got Medicare. And those are my true biographical details. And I also am a person of spirit. So that’s what spiritually fit means for me is that I remember that I’m not this terrible pinball machine in my mind, cranking out new ideas about how I can do life more perfectly so that everybody will think more highly of me.
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