Flannery O’Connor, an idiosyncratic young Southern writer and faithful Catholic, imagines a melodramatic movie trailer with a crazed, nymphomaniacal boarder, Star Drake (played by Maya Hawke, who also plays O’Connor and multiple other roles) getting her boarding-house hosts into violent trouble. Many other imaginary and real episodes then occur, often following various short stories of O’Connor, including “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, “Good Country People”, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, “Revelation”, and “Parker’s Back”.

After winning a writing competition, she travels to New York to get approval from a publisher for her novel, Wise Blood, but refuses the request that she outline her work. She discusses her novel with Robert Lowell, someone with whom she has mutual romantic feelings, though he eventually marries Elizabeth Hardwick, whom O’Connor meets at a writers’ party where she does not get along well with other people, even though Lowell describes O’Connor as his most talented student. O’Connor rejoins, “If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it!”) At the party, she relates the anecdote that when young, she was in a Pathé movie because she had trained a chicken to walk backward.

Coming back from New York, she feels tired and has facial rashes; She refuses to see a doctor for a while, though she finally gets treatment for it, though she eventually must use crutches, and at one point falls down the stairs. Her mother Regina, who is racist, tries to help her, though she does not always enjoy Flannery’s work, which she sees as abrasive. Flannery buys a peacock to comfort herself.

An Irish priest counsels her about her writing and other struggles; After receiving a letter from Lowell saying he married Hardwick, Flannery settles into a life of concentrated writing.

Words on the screen reveal that she lived fourteen years longer, before dying from the “French wolf”, lupus. The final words on the screen, post-credits, are her thanks to pigs for their pituitary glands needed for her lupus injections.