In Still Following Percy, a collection of interrelated essays, Lewis Lawson studies the Percy canon to speculate that an earlier and more fundamental shaping of Walker Percy's character and fictional imagination was his sense of the inadequacy of the relationship which he as an infant had with his mother and of her early death.

Lawson argues that the sense of loss led to Percy's tendency to regression, to his need to create his own life narrative in fiction after psychoanalysis had been insufficient as a means of reconstruction, and to his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Lawson interprets Percy's conversion as a statement of the possibility of reconciliation through the transcendent truth.