The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your reading of Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies. We hope that they will suggest a variety of ways to talk about this delightful and moving story of one woman's journey in faith. 

When Anne Lamott was twenty-five, her father died after a long struggle with brain cancer. Over the next few years she herself began to suffer from an overwhelming sense of desperation and fear, which she tried to suppress with alcohol and pills. Although she was managing to write and publish successful novels at the time, it was clear that her life was spinning out of control. In Traveling Mercies, a memoir that sparkles with wry wit and compassion, she now writes about this dark period of her life, and of her turn--to her own great surprise--to the community of Christian faith and love she found in a neighborhood church called St. Andrew's. 

In a book that will be cherished by anyone who has pursued a spiritual search down all sorts of unlikely paths, grieved at the death of friends, or felt bewildered at the challenges that daily life presents to love and courage, Anne Lamott gives us a wise and often humorous account of living in faith.