Anne Lamott was born in San Francisco, California, in 1954, the daughter of the writer Kenneth Lamott. She grew up in Marin County, north of San Francisco.At seventeen, she attended Goucher College in Maryland on a tennis scholarship, where she wrote for the school paper. However, she dropped out after two years and returned to the Bay Area,where she briefly worked for a magazine called WomenSports.

Lamott always knew that she wanted to write, and after moving to Bolinas, in Marin, she began to work on vignettes and stories. The discovery that her father was dying of brain cancer inspired her to organize these short pieces into her first novel, Hard Laughter, published in 1980 when Lamott was only twenty-six years old. Her next book, Rosie, came out three years later.

Lamott had been experiencing alcohol and drug problems, and in the mid-1980s, she quit...