Late in life, alone in a hermit's solitude, Winslow Albrecht Merryman sits down to write his confessions. A reputation for wisdom and holiness has, to his bafflement, attached itself to him, and he means to correct the record. The evidence of his own unworthiness, he is certain, fills a lifetime. Named for two painters by a mother who longed to be sophisticated, Winslow grows up an odd child in an ordinary mid-century American family. A perfectly conventional childhood reaches him as a long gauntlet of shame, failure, and quiet dread, lit only now and then by hope. He recounts it all in excruciating, self-lacerating, frequently hilarious detail: the burden of being told he isn't living up to his potential, the small humiliations that hardened into a habit of expecting derision and, more often than not, arranging to receive it. Winslow is not the only voice in these pages. Woven through his confessions runs a second narrative, the same events seen from the outside, by the people whose lives he touched.

Between the man he insists he is and the life he actually lived, a stranger and more troubling possibility begins to take shape, one he would be the last to credit. Part Ignatius Reilly in body, part Eugene Gant in mind, part Thomas Merton in aspiration, Confessions of an Accidental Saint is a wry, aching, deeply human portrait of a man convinced of his own failure, and a quiet meditation on whether grace might do its work whether or not we ever see it.