Word by Word : Writer Anne Lamott has journeyed from drugs to motherhood to critical acclaim. Now she takes readers through the chaos of the ‘creative process.’

On an Advent morning, writer Anne Lamott sat in the kitchen of her San Rafael home, scowling at her black Lab retriever, Sadie. The dog had helped herself to the dozen cupcakes Lamott and her 5-year-old son, Sam, had baked for his kindergarten Christmas party. Sadie dolefully circled Lamott, eyes up, hoping for forgiveness. Wasn’t it the season of grace and love?

Lamott relented and gave Sadie a pat. After all, Lamott knows what it is like to scarf up an addictive delight that only makes you feel shaky, sick and empty later. For most of her adult life, Lamott was addicted to wine and whiskey, cocaine, methamphetamines and, as she described it, “the non-habit-forming marijuana.” She gave up drugs and drink in 1986, knowing they would kill her if she kept on.

These days, Lamott wrestles with another kind of addictive temptation: The rush of fame.

After good reviews, a West Coast “cult” following and modest hardcover sales for her four novels--”Hard Laughter,” “Joe Jones,” “Rosie” and “All New People”--Lamott hit the bestseller lists in 1993 with the nonfiction “Operating Instructions,” her journal of Sam’s birth and first year.

Lamott was 35 and single when she found out she was pregnant. Sam’s father was furious at the news and disappeared after she decided not to have an abortion. After only three years of sobriety, she wasn’t sure she was making a wise choice. It was just the one her heart told her to make.

“Operating Instructions” is full of Lamott’s unbounded, beautifully expressed love for Sam, who has become the touchstone of her life. But it is not a gingham-and-bunnies book. It’s more “Heart of Darkness” with diapers, which is probably why parents continue to grab it off the shelves.

Lamott said she wrote “Operating Instructions” because she had not seen a book that spoke to mothers who, like Lamott, “sometimes wanted to grab her infant by the ankles and swing him over her head like a bolo.”

Now Lamott’s second nonfiction work, “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” is taking off, with good reviews in newspapers from Seattle to New York and a spot on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list. The book’s title refers to advice Lamott’s father, writer Kenneth Lamott, gave her brother years ago as he crumbled under the weight of a school report on the avian world. “Bird by bird, buddy,” Lamott’s father said. “Just take it bird by bird.”

Lamott estimates that the book has sold 25,000 copies since its publication in the fall and expects it to outdo “Operating Instructions.”

“Bird by Bird” quickly made the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list, which is unsurprising, given Lamott’s strong Bay Area following. Although she cherishes her local readers, her father raised her to think that real recognition had to come from another quarter.

“What mattered most was how the East Coast responded to your work, and almost as important, how men responded,” she said.

Now Lamott has acclaim from two East Coast, male-revered media bastions. She was featured in a New York Times story and got a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal. Lamott said the attainment of what she calls “the golden calf” felt good--in a bad way.

“East Coast male acclaim is like a big plate of cocaine. I become dog-like. Like Sadie.” Lamott panted and lolled her tongue. “I ate, psychically, a dozen cupcakes. But the fact is, there are no free highs anymore. When I get high like that, I go through withdrawal, cravings and I need a bigger hit. Well, what’s a bigger hit than a half page in the New York Times? So I end up strung out and worried and needing the phone to ring. I tell my students, ‘If self-esteem arrives by mail, phone or fax, it’s not self-esteem. It’s a hit and it will wear off.’ ”

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Most writers would kill for just a moment of that high. And they might pick up “Bird by Bird” hoping to find the way to get it. The book’s voice is the one you’d hear in Lamott’s kitchen as she made coffee or rustled up some seed for her finches. She is a warm, generous and hilarious guide through the writer’s world and its treacherous swamps: jealousy, grandiosity, despair and paranoia.

Here is Lamott on the beginning of a day’s work: “Your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.”

“Bird by Bird” is full of such darkly funny, twisted thoughts. Lamott’s confessions give great relief to readers who thought they were the only ones who sat at their desks, paralyzed into non-writing while they wallowed in their jealousy of very successful (and surely undeserving) writers or imagined, with excruciating clarity, how their dearest friends get together regularly to chortle about how really awful their work is.

Lamott also offers concrete techniques, such as the short assignment and what might euphemistically be called feculent first drafts (although Lamott is not one for euphemism). She also suggests an uproarious way to prevent libel suits when fictionalizing real people. Following Lamott’s advice is almost guaranteed to improve a writer’s work.

But at that point, “Bird by Bird” flies off from most of the other books in the instructional flock. Lamott doesn’t guarantee that good writing will lead to big bucks, adulation or even an enduring warm, cozy glow.

“My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment,” she writes. “Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested. Most of my students do not want to hear this.”

And most writing teachers won’t tell them, she said.

“They encourage their students to believe they will get published and getting published will make them feel differently about themselves, and that the world will treat them differently,” she said. “And that to be successful on the world’s terms will bring a sense of satisfaction. And it won’t.”

So why write?

“It’s stuff you can work with,” she said, “to bring you closer to God.”

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Lamott is not employing some kind of New Age metaphor here. She converted to Christianity nine years ago, describes herself as a “left-wing holy roller” and talks about Jesus much as she talks about Sam and Sadie.

She has always felt a strong spirituality in her life, and started going to St. Andrew Presbyterian Church--a mostly black congregation in Marin City that is still her spiritual home--when she was still drinking. But she hated the “Jesus part.”

“I just couldn’t do the Jesus thing,” she said. “I struggled tooth and nail to avoid (it) because I can’t stand Christians. I can’t stand the Moral Majority mentality and I think the very, very worst people in government--I don’t want to name names, but let’s say George Bush and Newt Gingrich right off the top--are heavy Christians.”

But, as Lamott tells it, Jesus would simply not leave her alone.

“And as soon as I let him in, miracles began happening in my life. I felt different about myself, not like a guilt-racked, unlovable piece of (crap).”

Lamott said her “left-wing, atheist, agnostic” friends still roll their eyes at “Annie’s little blind spot.”

“They see me as having an imaginary friend, like Casper (the friendly ghost) or something,” she said.

Aside from the tiny enameled cross she wears, Lamott is nothing like her old stereotype of a Christian. Her speech and writing are peppered with enough profanities and obscenities to make the seraphim blush. Lamott has no intention of changing.

“I think Jesus has bigger fish to fry than to worry about whether or not I say ‘(expletive)’ a lot,” she said. “He’s got a third of the world going hungry every night.”

*

Her addiction to Republican-bashing, however, does trouble her.

“I really do think Jesus drinks himself to sleep when I trash Republicans,” she said. “It’s wrong. I know God loves Newt Gingrich as much as he loves me. And that he loves Newt as much as he loves O.J. Simpson and (accused mass-murderer) Charlie Ng. God loves us all exactly the same. But I have a terrible time with Republicans.”

Take, for example, she said, the Republican-sponsored Personal Responsibility Act, which would cut benefits to welfare mothers and, according to the Clinton Administration, dump 5 million children onto whatever other aid states, cities and private charities could offer. Lamott will be outside the local Safeway with petitions, doing her part to stop it.

“It’s so painful to think this really dehumanizing, repressive movement has so caught America’s heart and that we’re moving in that direction, instead of caring,” she said.

In California, she said, that movement is exemplified by the passage of Proposition 187 and the near victory by Senate candidate Michael Huffington. Lamott paused for a moment, visibly wrestling the bashing impulse. But it was too strong.

“As a friend of mine says, Huffington spelled backward is Mephistopheles.” She allowed herself a deliciously evil smile.

On the nonpolitical front, Lamott is working on a sequel to “Rosie.” She is resistant to an “Operating Instructions” follow-up, thinking that although Sam is bright, funny and “great copy,” it’s not in his best interest to be a public figure. Her writing classes at Book Passage, a store in Corte Madera, are filled into 1996. She’ll be on the faculty of the Squaw Valley writers’ conference this summer.

But her career is not uppermost in her mind these days.

“It’s funny. I don’t care nearly so much what happens to me as a writer now, because of Sam,” she said. “Before, I cared. I had this big huge hole in me. Christians talk about it being the God-shaped hole. Filling the hole had been such a propellent. It helped me get so much work done, because I was dancing as fast as I could.

“And all of a sudden, I stopped. I was fat and tired and milky and spit-uppy and weepy and hormonally challenged up the ying-yang and all of a sudden that hole was filled.”

Lamott said she is still learning that happiness and wholeness and blessings come in far different packages than most of us expect.

“Grace does not look like Las Vegas or a Hollywood sound set. Grace looks like a warm, friendly kitchen with a tender-hearted friend,” she said. “It’s hard to shift over, to realize that what will be really happy about today is making cookies with Sam, while we pray feverishly that Sadie won’t eat them.”