Annie Lamott Has Devoted Fans

On a warm spring evening, nearly 300 people squeeze in the Berkeley bookstore and wait. Soon a small woman in a loose floral dress and a black backpack walks up to the lectern and introduces herself. “Hi, I’m Annie and I’m an alcoholic.”

Anne Lamott doesn’t normally introduce herself this way at book signings. She is “a sober alcoholic,” and her fans are familiar with her struggle with the bottle, but tonight she says it more as a joke, as if she’s given so many speeches lately that she’s forgotten whom she’s talking to. The audience laughs.

Tonight, she says she’ll skip Chapter 1.”Its terrible, unreadable, so we’ll just skip it,” Lamott says dryly to the amused crowd.

Lamott, who lives in Marin, has developed a growing and devoted following in the past few years.

She writes columns for Salon, an on-line magazine (http:/ /www.salonmagazine.com). Time says “the amusing and tortured Anne Lamott … could be the Best of the Web.”

In “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” Lamott gives this advice on first drafts: “I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much.”

“Crooked Little Heart” was not a first draft. Lamott spent four years working on the 324-page novel.

Lamott began writing when she was around 7 or 8. Her father was a writer, and he taught her that if she was going to be one, she had to pay attention. So she did. In high school, she decided to become a writer. “Then I wrote some terrible, terrible stories,” she writes in “Bird by Bird.”

At the age of 23, Lamott’s father was diagnosed with brain cancer. Her father told her to pay attention and take notes. She did. The result was “Hard Laughter,” Lamott’s first published work. Her father read the book as it was being written but did not live to see it published.

Lamott’s says writing about her personal experiences is natural for her but says she keeps a lot of things private. “Several layers away,” she says.