Who is Anne Lamott from Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith and what is their importance?

Anne is the author of this book consisting of a series of essays about various aspects of her life. She is a young girl in the early essays. She has two brothers, one older and one younger, and wants desperately to please her parents. She prays from an early age, but in secret because she does not want to go against her parents' teachings that religion is for the ignorant. She falls into a lifestyle of drinking and drugs and spends the next several years either drunk, high or hung over. She attends college briefly then makes her living by writing, teaching tennis and cleaning houses.