Anne Lamott, Original Mommy Blogger

Without Anne Lamott, the entire sub-category of contemporary parent writing —which includes Brett Paesel, Christie Mellor, Ayun Halliday—as well as all those mommy bloggers — probably wouldn't exist. Her 1993 bestseller "Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year" set the standard, acknowledging the doubts and the difficulties, the sense that many first-time parents have of being cast into an alternate universe where simply taking a shower and getting dressed in clean clothes is a moral victory over the chaos and entropy that every infant leaves in his or her wake. "I am much too self-centered, cynical, eccentric, and edgy to raise a baby," Lamott writes in those pages, an admission that anyone who's ever been there can't help but recognize.