Flannery by Brad Gooch

The first official gathering of the entering freshman class, in September 1942, was a formal tea at the Old Executive Mansion, the residence of President Wells. Once home to Confederate Governor Joseph E. Brown, as well as to General Sherman during his March to the Sea, the Palladian high Greek Revival governor's mansion, with its soaring fifty-foot rotunda and gilded dome, was located on the same block as the Cline Mansion. Mary Flannery could spy its massive rose-colored masonry walls from her bedroom window, just beyond the backyard where, according to Betty Boyd Love, she still "kept ducks." Yet her family had to force her to walk around the block to the social event. "Flannery did not want to go but was pressured into it," remembers their classmate Harriet Thorp Hendricks. "She donned the required long dress - but wore her tennis shoes." When asked why she was sitting alone in a corner, she replied, "Well, I'm anti-social."

-Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor

His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.

-Wise Blood

What can I say about Flannery O'Connor? She's one of my very favorite authors, to start. Her dark, surprisingly funny stories won my heart in college. (The line I quoted above from Wise Blood, which has stuck in my head for years, would have been enough to do the trick.) I love the Southern Gothic atmosphere, the religious fervor, the misfits. All the same, a few pages into this biography by Brad Gooch, I was unsure as to whether or not I would continue. I'm at home right now, surrounded by a bevy of unread books, and as much as I like O'Connor's stories, I wasn't sure if her life had been interesting enough to support a biography.* I decided to push through for a chapter or so, and I'm glad I did.

Going into this book, I didn't know much about the particulars of O'Connor's life. I knew she'd lived at least part of her life in Savannah (somewhere I have a photo of myself outside of her home there) and that she died young from a degenerative illness. Other than that, the picture was pretty blank.

Although her life was not packed with drama, O'Connor herself was enough of a character to keep the reader absorbed. She grew up living a charmed life in Savannah, marred only when her father was diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that would later kill both him and his daughter. Her early work was considered weird but promising, and she managed to parlay her college writing and cartooning into a place at graduate school at the University of Iowa. From there, she worked patiently and persistently, spending six years developing Wise Blood, her first novel. It was not a huge success, and critical reception was mixed. She kept going.

Even when lupus began to ravage her health, she kept going, her barbed wit always intact. I felt like Gooch rendered this all quite vividly. My picture of O'Connor is certainly much clearer than it was before I read the book. In addition, Gooch does a nice job of showing where incidents from her life were worked into her stories - I reread "Revelation" last night and enjoyed recognizing the influences that Gooch had pointed out. Plus "Revelation" is just flat-out great.

If, by chance, you haven't read any O'Connor: Wise Blood is as good a place to start as any. She didn't write that much, so you're on pretty solid footing no matter what you choose. Also she had the best titles ever, no? (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, A Good Man is Hard to Find, Everything that Rises Must Converge). Incidentally, at least two of those titles have religious origins - I was aware of the amount of religion in O'Connor's works but never, oddly enough, realized how religious she actually was (Answer: plenty religious). Gooch treats O'Connor's religious and social views pretty evenhandedly, though I think these aspects of her character are what could make her, as a person, less relatable to a modern reader. (Otherwise, I could see myself hanging out on the front porch with her, eating vanilla wafers and watching her peacocks.)

Up next: I haven't picked up anything yet, but I'm thinking American Gods by Neil Gaiman. That may change, though. Choices - exciting!

*Compare, example, with those recent biographies of John Cheever and Patricia Highsmith, both of which I want to read.