Book of Common Prayer

Afterward, Mrs. Washington spent an hour at her devotions, reading the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer used in the Episcopal Church.

It is also, like “Play It as It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer,” a book with a lost or troubled daughter at its heart.

Bishop Griswold had signaled his more moderate stance as early as 1976, when, as a priest from Pennsylvania, he helped revise the church’s main text, the Book of Common Prayer.

Als, who started reading Didion in the 1970s, remembers being jolted by the first line of her 1977 novel, “A Book of Common Prayer”: “I will be her witness.”

He read “A Book of Common Prayer” in 1977, when he was living with his brother in San Diego.