Who is Marlo Morgan (Narrator) from Mutant Message Down Under and what is their importance?

Marlo is the book's author and narrator, a middle-aged (fifties), female, American health care professional. At the start of the book, and of her physical/spiritual journey, she portrays herself as urbanized, sophisticated, and with a strong sense of self. She believes she is a well rounded, thoughtful, sensitive human being with a degree of enlightenment. Through the course of the narrative, and as a result of the events she writes about, she portrays herself as experiencing a profound illumination, as having realized that that self-image is an illusion and that she was in fact selfish, superficial, and removed from what it truly means to live with awareness.