Flannery O’Connor would become a highly regarded Christian (Catholic) writer, noted for her oddball fictional characters and weirdly wonderful twists of plot. She died young, in 1964 at age 39, carrying unknown potential to the grave. While still a student, aged 20 and 21, at the University of Iowa writers’ program, far from her natal home in Georgia, O’Connor kept a “prayer journal,” addressing entries to God.

Midway through, O’Connor gives up the “My Dear God” salutation. She writes: “I have decided this is not much as a direct medium of prayer. Prayer is…of the moment & this is too slow for the moment.” Most of the subsequent pages I’d categorize as a journal of spiritual musings, though many entries end with a closing petition asked of God or “My Lady of Perpetual Help.”

"This is a thin volume bulked up by a facsimile version of the material, originally written in a Sterling composition book....  You can see [O'Connor's] cross-outs and the evidence of excised portions. Did it deserve to be published? Yes."

This is a thin volume bulked up by a facsimile version of the material, originally written in a Sterling composition book. (Even the familiarly speckled cover is reproduced.) You can see her cross-outs and the evidence of excised portions. Did it deserve to be published? Yes.

In early entries she works with a structural outline, contemplating four traditional types of prayer: adoration, contrition, thanksgiving and supplication, connecting them to her current mindset. “Contrition in me is largely imperfect. I don’t know if I’ve ever been sorry for a sin because it hurt You.” The day she intends to write about thanksgiving, she rather exults, “Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story.” Something identifiable or eventually published? The curious reader isn’t told. O’Connor later reflects, through her personal lens, on another categorical grouping: faith, hope and charity.

In these pages O’Connor reveals herself as a writer, talking to God about her hopes, her fears of the “scourge” of mediocrity, her requests for grace and for God’s blessings, and her desire to have a Godward bent, even when she feels inadequate.

The writing exercise doesn’t come to a wholly satisfactory conclusion, as her last entry, in September, the beginning of a school year, admits that “the feeling I egg up writing here lasts approximately a half hour and seems a sham.” Oh dear. Haven’t we all felt that way at times? But one might hope it is a fleeting sentiment, soon followed by a more spiritually hopeful paragraph at the turn of a page. For later installments, we late-coming readers will need to turn to her collected letters, missives directed to mortal, not heavenly, companions.