Anne Lamott

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.

She goes through a series of relationships that include married men and will much later admit she tries to remake those men into images of her father. When Anne becomes pregnant, she has an abortion. She describes the nightmare of bleeding...