When I learned that a Flannery OConnor prayer journal was to be published, I initially pictured an empty, spiral-bound gift book with sardonic thought for the day quotes scattered throughout. I am relieved to report that I had the wrong idea.

The journal, written by twenty-one-year-old Flannery OConnor in a cheap Sterling notebook and concealed in a bundle of papers, was discovered by her biographer William Sessions in 2002. This week, The New Yorker published a hefty excerpt of the little book (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Both Sessions introduction to the journal and The New Yorker excerpt refer to the entries as prayers, but considering the ongoing and unfolding nature of the monologue, prayer is a better description. In this case, OConnor wasnt a writer sitting at her typewriter crafting prayers; she was a girl pouring out her heart in longhand.

The book includes a facsimile of the notebook, written in slightly messy cursive, along with a transcription. I love the OConnor that shines through these pages. The infinite regress known to the self-consciousness diarist is on full display as she questions the honesty of her motives for writing. After a witty remark she writes, But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought. Deeply earnest, she chides herself when she starts writing like an author to an audience rather than a soul to her maker. But she does not, I am happy to say, repress her sense of humor. At one point she prays, Make me a mystic, immediately.

The young OConnor, transplanted from Milledgeville, Georgia, to the Iowa Writers Workshop, fears that her faith may falter. She prays, I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. She demonstrates ardor even as she confesses her lack of feeling. Her deepest desire is that she will glorify God with her writing. After writing a story, she prays Dont let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your storyjust like the typewriter was mine.

A Prayer Journal by Flannery OConnor will be released in November, and I heartily commend it to you. If you preorder now, you will have it in plenty of time to pepper your Thanksgiving prayers with OConnorisms like, When I think of all I have to be grateful for, I wonder that you dont just kill me now.

Image: Flannery O’Connor with Robie Macauley in 1947, photo by C. Cameron Macauley