When Anne Lamott was in high school, she lost herself. She was a “super-achiever,” a “flight attendant in the world,” but sublimating her pain with drugs and alcohol only left her emptier.

When she was 25, she experienced a loss so sharp it would follow her for decades. But she kept on living. 

The Marin author who has written more than a dozen books that explore faith, loss and connection is no stranger to death. She knows what dealing with death takes, but also the incandescence it can bring. Lamott has conquered alcoholism, renewed her connection to spirituality and, in recent years, started a new chapter of her growing family. 

On Thursday, Oct. 24, Lamott plans to talk with “Death, Sex and Money” podcast host Anna Sale about the life experiences that brought her to embrace death and, by proxy, life. She is the headlining speaker on the opening night of Reimagine End of Life Festival, an event series examining all the ways that death touches our lives. Programming will include film screenings, concerts and interactive art exhibits around the city. 

In an exclusive interview with The Chronicle, Lamott talked about her early relationship to death, how she’s learned to cope with inevitable endings, and much more.

Q: Most of your books have touched upon death or at least loss in some way — of loved ones, of oneself, of faith. What were some of the most formative experiences in your life of loss that shaped you and your writing?

A: Well, the main — the huge and early loss — was of my father at 25 from brain cancer. We were living out in Bolinas, and that was when I first made contact with hospice. This was 40 years ago; I just turned 65 in April. And as soon as hospice enters your life, everything is different forever because, first of all, you learn the skills of helping people cross over from life to death, to whatever awaits us, and second of all, they just make you so much less afraid of the process. For me, it was a cavalry arriving for a devastating and impossible loss my family was going through. 

Then my best friend died when I think I was 38. I think she was 37, and that was just unfathomable because she was so young and she had a young daughter. But again, hospice was there. It was like they were birth coaches in different forms, but they were helping people make peace with a life that was possibly going to be much shorter than they’d hoped and expected.

Q: Before your father’s illness and his death, what was your relationship to death or your own processing of your own death?

A: When I was younger and in my teens, I didn’t think I’d see 18. And then I’d see 21. And then I didn’t think I’d see 30. And then, when I turned 32, I got sober and that was the hugest change I’ve ever made. And then I started to be able to look at some of the old childhood fears and mistruths that I’d held on to that had always just literally scared me to death. 

In our culture, we don’t talk about it very much, and so when I got sober, which is 33 years ago, I got to start helping people die without being drunk or stoned myself and because I had a religious faith. Also, I just didn’t have all that much fear, and I was able to show up for people who were dying or had someone in their family who was dying and needed support. 

Before that though, I had lost good friends but not closest friends, and lots of animals — which was always the end of the world. I’d been a philosophy student in college so I’d read a lot about death and living with acknowledgment that this is the truth of our lives. … Our lives are short and they go by really quickly.

Because death is kind of standing there with its hands on its hips, you better get around to living, you better get around to savoring and experiencing each day as it comes because it’s limited. It’s a limited-time offer.

Q: You were born, raised and live in the Bay Area now. What are your thoughts about how we talk about these painful truths of life and death in the Bay Area — a place that is home to so much suffering, but at the same time, excess and luxury?

Even though my parents were hipper than many — and atheists — I remember that when my grandpa died, it was as if he’d never lived. It was as if the big eraser had come down, and we didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about what it  might have been like for him, we didn’t talk about the absence of him or the presence of him after his death or anything helpful, let’s say. 

Then, the Bay Area experience that was most profound in terms of acknowledging and being steeped in death, of course, was the AIDS epidemic, where every week someone you knew or someone a friend knew died from AIDS. That was really when, I think, death came out of the closet. 

When I was a kid, even in the Bay Area, it was just considered unseemly to talk about it, and if you asked about it, grownups would say, “Oh, for God’s sake! Think about happy things; you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

But what we didn’t know was that some of us didn’t. Some of us were going to die young, whether from AIDS or breast cancer or other diseases. There was almost no help in terms of being encouraged to show up for dying and transformation until the AIDS epidemic.

After that, it was really such a breakthrough in terms of being forced to — and maybe even willing to notice — both the tragedy of the epidemic but also of the incredible transformation, both the gay community and the social community of S.F. in their outspoken surrounding of people who were dying with love and medicine and lasagnas and everything else we had to offer. 

Then it led somehow organically to facing their own mortality. When people face their own mortality, they are starting to ask questions about the meaning of life, which is why I think we’re even here.

Q: You recently got married for the first time, at 65. You’re a mother and a grandmother. In this stage of your life, how have your prepared or coped with the idea that you’re going to die?

Because so many people died in my life when I was much younger, I really see it as a friend. And because of hospice and my church and the intensely close bonds of my friendships, I feel really safe, you know? I feel that I’m equipped for pretty much whatever comes, unless it involves snakes [laughs]. In which case, all bets are off.

You know, I hope I don’t die right away. I got married six months ago. We’re going on our honeymoon on Thursday. 

The incredible blessings of my life make me hope I get to live a little longer or a lot longer. But then also, the incredible blessings of my life are a direct result of having confronted death.

I think that’s a great paradox. That the closer you draw to death, to sitting with it and knowing it and having lived through other people’s deaths and seeing how safe and beautifully cared for we are, it just so enhances life because there’s a little benevolent pressure to really live because it doesn’t last forever and it just goes by so quickly.

Reimagine End of Life Festival Opening Night: Anne Lamott with Anna Sale. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24. $39. Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St., S.F. letsreimagine.org