In 2009, Jessica Hooten Wilson was freshly finished with her doctoral dissertation, which included the Southern Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor. Over dinner at an academic conference in Rome, a revered O'Connor scholar mentioned to her the writer's unfinished novel. Wilson was intrigued, and later that year she traveled to see it herself at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia, which holds O'Connor's papers in its archives.