Her journal is painfully honest. She asks for what she wants, admits she deserves none of it, and sits quietly in the presence of the One who loves her so.
She kept this journal from January 1946 to September 1947, covering the earliest years in her 20s. She’d moved from Savannah to Iowa City to study journalism and longed to have her writing mean something. Three years after the close of this journal, she was diagnosed with Lupus, a disease that took her life in 1964. She was only 39 years old. It was in her deepest suffering of the disease that she wrote the novels and short stories she’s known for: Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, A Good Man is Hard to Find…
She was born in Savannah, 45 minutes from my birthplace, and died the day after my birthday. I’m not going to dwell on those parallels.