Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist, addiction medicine specialist, and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she directs the Addiction Medicine Program and Fellowship and leads the Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Dopamine Nation, which has sold more than 1.5 million copies, and Drug Dealer, MD. Her work has made her one of the most influential voices on addiction, compulsive overconsumption, and the difficult search for balance in a world of constant stimulation.
Her new book, Radical Surrender, turns from our pursuit of pleasure to our pursuit of control. Beginning with her own experience of grief and existential reckoning, Lembke blends personal stories, neuroscience, and the wisdom of recovery to explore what happens when we stop trying to bend reality to our will. Her argument is both countercultural and hopeful: in an age engineered for certainty and mastery, surrender may be the path back to meaning, connection, and mystery.
21 Questions with Anna Lembke
1. “I couldn’t have written my latest book without…”
Some distance from grief and loss.
2. What’s the thing most people get wrong about being a writer?
People often think there’s some secret they can unlock to make the writing easy. There isn’t. Writing is a messy business, and it’s hard.
3. What’s the first thing you do after you finish a draft?
I don’t know if my work ever feels finished. At some point, I just realize it is what it is and I let it go.
4. Do you read your reviews?
Yes for written reviews. No for online comments.
5. What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?
You don’t have to feel like writing to write. Just sit down and do it.
6. Where do you find new ideas, and how do you keep track of them?
I find that one thing leads to another. I’ll write a book and feel like it opens up a window to something that I can’t do justice to in the current book, so I save it for the next one. I sometimes jot ideas down in Notes on my laptop.
7. What’s something about you that people wouldn’t guess from your bio?
I’m tall.
8. How did you find your agent?
I got rejected by a few agents, and the last one referred me to my current agent, Bonnie Solow, who is awesome.
9. What have you stopped doing that made you a better writer, or made the writing life better?
I stopped second-guessing myself so much and tried to stay truer to what I really want to say, sentence by sentence.
10. What tech tools—including AI—do you use, and which ones do you actively ignore?
I massively use Microsoft Word to move paragraphs around, for better and for worse. I generally avoid AI, except on occasion to look up information, encyclopedia-style.
11. What’s one thing you pay for that has been worth every penny to your writing career?
A house in a quiet-ish location with a room of my own.
12. How many drafts do you typically go through before showing the manuscript to your editor?
I’m not shy about showing early drafts. My problem is that I’m always editing and re-editing, far too late in the process, to the annoyance at times of my editor, who just wants it to be done.
13. Describe your ideal workday. How does it compare with your actual one?
Ideal: I write all day, barely edit, and say exactly what I wanted to say. Actual: I spend half the day procrastinating, and when I do finally eke out a page, I’m not very happy with it.
14. What’s your most common form of procrastination?
Editing and re-editing stuff I wrote the day before.
15. What’s the best non-writing skill that’s helped your writing career?
Channeling insomnia into a time to think about how to improve my book.
16. What’s the strangest or most unexpected response you’ve received from a reader?
Praise!
17. What’s something you’ve changed your mind about recently?
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.
18. What are you unwilling to do to sell more books?
Get my own social media account.
19. If you could write one book in a totally different genre, what would it be?
Mystery.
20. What’s something about the writing life that still surprises you?
How hard it is, and yet how I still feel happiest immersed in that creative process.
21. What is your new book about?
Letting go in a world addicted to control.
You can learn more about Anna’s book here: Radical Surrender.
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Until next time,
Panio