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Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor
The landscape of American literature was fundamentally changed when Flannery O'Connor stepped onto the scene with her first published book, Wise Blood , in 1952. Her fierce, sometimes comic novels and stories reflected the darkly funny, vibrant, and theologically sophisticated woman who wrote them. Brad Gooch brings to life O'Connor's significant friendships -- with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy, and James Dickey among others -- and her deeply felt convictions, as expressed in her communications with Thomas Merton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Betty Hester. Hester was famously known as "A" in O'Connor's collected letters, The Habit of Being , and a large cache of correspondence to her from O'Connor was made available to scholars, including Brad Gooch, in 2006. O'Connor's capacity to live fully -- despite the chronic disease that eventually confined her to her mother's farm in Georgia -- is illuminated in this engaging and authoritative biography.
Praise for
"Flannery O'Connor, one of the best American writers of short fiction, has found her ideal biographer in Brad Gooch. With elegance and fairness, Gooch deals with the sensitive areas of race and religion in O'Connor's life. He also takes us back to those heady days after the war when O'Connor studied creative writing at Iowa. There is much that is new in this book, but, more important, everything is presented in a strong, clear light."-Edmund White
"This splendid biography gives us no saint or martyr but the story of a gifted and complicated woman, bent on making the best of the difficult hand fate has dealt her, whether it is with grit and humor or with an abiding desire to make palpable to readers the terrible mystery of God's grace."-Frances Kiernan, author of Seeing Mary A Life of Mary McCarthy
"A good biographer is hard to find. Brad Gooch is not merely good-he is extraordinary. Blessed with the eye and ear of a novelist, he has composed the life that admirers of the fierce and hilarious Georgia genius have long been hoping for."-Joel Conarroe, President Emeritus, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
Praise for
"Flannery O'Connor, one of the best American writers of short fiction, has found her ideal biographer in Brad Gooch. With elegance and fairness, Gooch deals with the sensitive areas of race and religion in O'Connor's life. He also takes us back to those heady days after the war when O'Connor studied creative writing at Iowa. There is much that is new in this book, but, more important, everything is presented in a strong, clear light."-Edmund White
"This splendid biography gives us no saint or martyr but the story of a gifted and complicated woman, bent on making the best of the difficult hand fate has dealt her, whether it is with grit and humor or with an abiding desire to make palpable to readers the terrible mystery of God's grace."-Frances Kiernan, author of Seeing Mary A Life of Mary McCarthy
"A good biographer is hard to find. Brad Gooch is not merely good-he is extraordinary. Blessed with the eye and ear of a novelist, he has composed the life that admirers of the fierce and hilarious Georgia genius have long been hoping for."-Joel Conarroe, President Emeritus, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
464 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
155 people are currently reading
2650 people want to read
About the author
Brad Gooch
28 books107 followersBrad Gooch is the author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (Little, Brown, 2009.) His previous books include City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara; as well as Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America; three novels--Scary Kisses, The Golden Age of Promiscuity, Zombie00; a collection of stories, Jailbait and Other Stories, chosen by Donald Barthelme for a Pushcart Foundation Writer’s Choice Award; a collection of poems, The Daily News; and two memoirs, Finding the Boyfriend Within and Dating the Greek Gods.
His work has been featured in numerous magazines including: The New Republic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Travel and Leisure, Partisan Review, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Art Forum, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, and regularly on The Daily Beast.
A Guggenheim fellow in Biography, he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and a Furthermore grant in publishing from the J.M. Kaplan Fund.
A professor of English at William Paterson University, he earned his PhD at Columbia University, and lives in New York City.
His work has been featured in numerous magazines including: The New Republic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Travel and Leisure, Partisan Review, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Art Forum, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, and regularly on The Daily Beast.
A Guggenheim fellow in Biography, he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and a Furthermore grant in publishing from the J.M. Kaplan Fund.
A professor of English at William Paterson University, he earned his PhD at Columbia University, and lives in New York City.
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December 14, 2011
Do a quick Google search for Flannery O'Connor and the result is an astounding 4,590,000 in .21 seconds. Yet the majority of what is written about Flannery O'Connor concerns the literary criticism of her work, not her biography. And, if you take Ms. O'Connor at face value, there's not a lot to say. Brad Gooch, author of "Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, published in 2009, chose the O'Connor's own words as the book's epigraph: "As for biographies, there won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy."
What Brad Gooch accomplishes in his careful biography, among other things, is to show that Miss O'Connor was a droll wit and a master of understatement. It's not surprising that Flannery O'Connor spoke about time spent in the chicken yard. From a young age, Flannery was a collector of rare varieties of chickens. Her first claim to fame was Pathe' News showing up at her Savannah, Georgia home to film six year old Flannery and one of her precious chickens which she had taught to walk backwards. Well, it was 1931. The country was in a depression. Pathe' was known for its, shall we say, lighthearted news reels shown before feature films to poor folks looking for cheap entertainment.
O'Connor was fortunate to have been born into a wealthy family, at least on her mother's side, the Clines. Father, Edward O'Connor, was tall and had the good looks, but his social background lacked the ethereal realm of the Clines. After all, the Cline's laid claim to Aunt Katie Semmes who had been married to Raphael Semmes, the son of the famous, or infamous, Confederate naval raider during the recent unpleasantness between the states.
Born in 1925, in Savannah, Flannery was a daddy's girl. There was always a distance between Flannery and her mother, Regina. Father Edward doted on his little girl. He was the purchaser of the unusual menagerie of chickens of which Flannery was so fond. Flannery would draw pictures and write little notes to her father. He would share them with friends and co-workers.
In the boom before the depression, Ed O'Connor became a successful realtor and builder. The crash put an end to that. He pulled on family connections to secure a position with the earliest form of the Federal Housing Agency. That entailed moving to Atlanta. O'Connor rented a cottage in Buckhead, specifically selecting the house because it overlooked the duck pond which he knew would provide hours of entertainment for Flannery.
But death came for Ed O'Connor at a young age. Lupus killed him at age 45. Flannery was 15. Her father's death devastated her.
Mother Regina took her husband's death in stride. She moved Flannery to the old Cline family farm called Andalusia just outside of Millidgeville, Georgia. It was there that Flannery would spend most of her life.
Regina was a domineering mother. She selected suitable companions for her daughter. She selected the schools she would attend. Flannery graduated from Peabody College and went on to Georgia State College for Women, graduated in an accelerated program of three years. Here, Flannery demonstrated a flair for art and the beginnings of a writer. She aspired to be a cartoonist. Her technique was production of images through linoleum cuts. There were easier methods, but Flannery always sought perfection no matter how difficult the technique required.
As difficult as it was for Regina to allow Flannery to go, Flannery was accepted for a coveted place in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She went there with the intention of studying journalism. However, under the tutelage of Paul Engel, Flannery turned to fiction. Engel was her greatest supporter. He wrote that O'Connor could walk past a pool hall and describe every sight, sound and smell that emanated from the place.
O'Connor landed a contract with Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich for her first novel, "Wise Blood." Because she wrote at a snail's pace and constantly revised, edited and redrafted chapter after chapter, the first novel was seven years in production. HB&J lost interest. However, Robert Giroux had left Harcourt and gone to what would eventually become FS&G. Giroux would be the moving force behind the publication of "Wise Blood."
Critics were widely divided in their reception of O'Connor's first novel. During that time, it was not required that reviewers identify themselves. Hiding behind the title of their publications, "The New Yorker" and "Time Magazine" anonymous critics blasted O'Connor's first work. Other reviewers recognized that America had a new and most unusual writer on their hands.
Back home in Milledgeville, Flannery's novel was a quandary in the realm of social reaction. How could Mary Flannery O'Connor, a good young Catholic lady of good family create a character of the nature of Hazel Motes? The obligatory tea parties, which Flannery despised, were given. The question then became what to do with Flannery's book so graciously inscribed to the guests at those tea parties. It was a puzzle. Even the men in town had their own opinion. One physician was heard to say, "Well, I'll tell you one thing. That young woman doesn't know what goes on in a whore house." I suppose that was some small comfort to the more genteel citizens, if that word ever got back to them.
But "Wise Blood" had brought Flannery freedom. She became a member of the Yaddo Artists' colony where she befriended poet Robert Lowell. Robert and Sally Fitzgerald were fast friends. While at Yaddo, Flannery would turn her attention to the short story. It was here that stories such as "The Life You Save May be Your Own" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" began to take shape.
In 1955, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" appeared as an anthology with nine other stories, including her first O.Henry first prize stories. Life for Flannery O'Connor was looking up.
However, Flannery's health was poor. Her mother Regina saw to it that she received all the necessary medical tests. Regina told her she had arthritis. Eventually, Flannery would learn from a friend in whom her mother had confided that it wasn't arthritis, it was Lupus.
It was after O'Connor's discovery of her true illness that Gooch reveals a portrait of a woman who never flinched at the knowledge she had inherited the illness that killed her father. O'Connor rarely let her illness break her routine.
Flannery was up at six, praying Prime from the breviary. She dressed and attended mass. By nine a.m. she was seated at her writing desk in her room at Andalusia. She wrote from nine to noon. By the end of three hours of constant writing, her illness left her fatigued. On those days she felt well, she would receive guests on the porch of Andalusia approximately 3:30 till 5p.m.
O'Connor entered the lecture circuit constantly appearing at colleges and writers' forums discussing such topics as "The Catholic Southern Writer," "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," and other similar topics her works had given rise to question.
During it all, Flannery thought she had found time for love. The Librarians, bless their hearts, had seen fit to introduce a young Dane, Erik Lankgjear, a text book salesman on the southern route. Erik became known as Flannery's boyfriend. However, he had other plans. Eventually, he returned to Denmark, delayed his return ostensibly for extended studies in literature, and finally sent Flannery and engagement notice announcing his forthcoming marriage. Flannery graciously responded she would welcome him and his bride in hers and her mother's home.
Although no one can know for sure, Flannery was kissed once and only once by the traveling book salesman. He found it less than pleasing. And, yes. He kissed and told. In an interview with Christopher O'Hare, Langkjear said, "As our lips touched I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no real muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori>...So I had the feeling of kissing a skeleton." Ah, how gallant.
Living and writing in relative isolation from the time she discovered she was suffering from Lupus, O'Connor never stopped working. She frequently traveled, lecturing English Literature Students, and was a regular guest at the Cheney residence in Nashville, Tennessee, where she rubbed elbows with Robert Penn Warren, whom she called "Red." Peter Taylor, Allen Tate and others were regular readers for O'Connor. She delighted in performing "A Good Man is Hard to Find."
In 2007 O'Connor's private letters were released, providing Brad Gooch with a wealth of information previously unknown about O'Connor's life, philosophy, and her creative process. Brad Gooch was a patient biographer. He held off attempting to write this biography out of respect for Sally Fitzgerald who claimed she intended on publishing her biography of O'Connor. Yet, when Fitzgerald died at age 83, no manuscript was found. Gooch's work was well worth the wait.
Above everything else, Gooch has shown us the living human being behind a relatively short collection of work. And he has shown us how other well known authors perceived her. We have her opinions of them as well.
Pointing to his copy of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," William Faulkner exclaimed, "Now that's some good stuff." Carson McCullers despised her. Flannery's feeling for McCullers was on par. Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams made her plumb sick.
When it was suggested to T.S. Eliot that he should publish "A Good Man is Hard to Find" in England, he dutifully read the book and declined. Eliot responded his nerves just couldn't take Miss O'Connor. Well, keep calm and carry on.
Under the surface of Flannery O'Connor's writing life lie her feelings for her domineering mother. One friend, when asked what Flannery would do without her mother replied she'd be lost. She'd lose half her material. No doubt, Flannery killed off her mother repeatedly in various and sundry ways through a number of stories.
Regina is the stand in for the grandmother who would have been a good woman if there'd have been somebody there to shoot her every day. After Regina converted Andalusia from a dairy farm to a beef farm, Flannery wrote her O.Henry prize winning "Green Leaf," wherein the protagonist lady farmer is gored to death by one of her prized bulls. When asked how her mother would feel about her numerous demises within the pages of Flannery's stories, she blithely remarked, "Oh, she never reads my stuff."
Shortly before her death, editor Robert Giroux visited Flannery and Regina at Andalusia. Giroux was net at the gate by mother and daughter. Flannery's tremendous flock of peacocks and pea fowl made the journey to the house seem interminable. That evening at the dinner table, Regina asked Giroux, "Isn't there some way you might get Flannery to right about nice people?" Flannery found no humor in the conversation.
O'Connor was well aware of the potential of violence in humanity. Her philosophy regarding such frank depictions of it was that people for the most part were so inured to its occurrence that they had to be slapped in the face to see it and do something about it. She and Peckinpaugh most likely would have gotten along famously.
Flannery completed one of her finest stories, "Revelation" close to the time of her death. In her hospital bed she kept a notebook in which she was penning her last story, "Parker's Back." These and other stories were published posthumously in her final anthology, "Everything That Rises Must Converge."
Flannery O'Connor died August 3, 1964. She was thirty-nine years old. She was buried the next day at Memory Hill Cemetery in Millidgeville, Georgia. Today, Andalusia is a public shrine. Whether one will find any chickens that walk backward is a question that one must determine alone.
In 1971, Robert Giroux published "The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor." It won the National Book Award in 1972. Robert Giroux accepted the award on her behalf. Backstage a celebrated author, whom Gooch had the good grace not to name, complained to Giroux,"Do you really think Flannery O'Connor was a great writer? She's such a Roman Catholic." Giroux responded, "I'm surprised at you, to misjudge her so completely. If she were here, she'd set you straight. She'd impress you. You'd have a hard time out-talking her."
In truth, O'Connor would have said, "Whoever invented cocktail parties should be drawn and quartered."
In 1988, the Library of America chose Flannery O'Connor as the first author born in the 20th Century who works would be published in this canonical selection of writings. That book stays on my bedside table.
What Brad Gooch accomplishes in his careful biography, among other things, is to show that Miss O'Connor was a droll wit and a master of understatement. It's not surprising that Flannery O'Connor spoke about time spent in the chicken yard. From a young age, Flannery was a collector of rare varieties of chickens. Her first claim to fame was Pathe' News showing up at her Savannah, Georgia home to film six year old Flannery and one of her precious chickens which she had taught to walk backwards. Well, it was 1931. The country was in a depression. Pathe' was known for its, shall we say, lighthearted news reels shown before feature films to poor folks looking for cheap entertainment.
O'Connor was fortunate to have been born into a wealthy family, at least on her mother's side, the Clines. Father, Edward O'Connor, was tall and had the good looks, but his social background lacked the ethereal realm of the Clines. After all, the Cline's laid claim to Aunt Katie Semmes who had been married to Raphael Semmes, the son of the famous, or infamous, Confederate naval raider during the recent unpleasantness between the states.
Born in 1925, in Savannah, Flannery was a daddy's girl. There was always a distance between Flannery and her mother, Regina. Father Edward doted on his little girl. He was the purchaser of the unusual menagerie of chickens of which Flannery was so fond. Flannery would draw pictures and write little notes to her father. He would share them with friends and co-workers.
In the boom before the depression, Ed O'Connor became a successful realtor and builder. The crash put an end to that. He pulled on family connections to secure a position with the earliest form of the Federal Housing Agency. That entailed moving to Atlanta. O'Connor rented a cottage in Buckhead, specifically selecting the house because it overlooked the duck pond which he knew would provide hours of entertainment for Flannery.
But death came for Ed O'Connor at a young age. Lupus killed him at age 45. Flannery was 15. Her father's death devastated her.
Mother Regina took her husband's death in stride. She moved Flannery to the old Cline family farm called Andalusia just outside of Millidgeville, Georgia. It was there that Flannery would spend most of her life.
Regina was a domineering mother. She selected suitable companions for her daughter. She selected the schools she would attend. Flannery graduated from Peabody College and went on to Georgia State College for Women, graduated in an accelerated program of three years. Here, Flannery demonstrated a flair for art and the beginnings of a writer. She aspired to be a cartoonist. Her technique was production of images through linoleum cuts. There were easier methods, but Flannery always sought perfection no matter how difficult the technique required.
As difficult as it was for Regina to allow Flannery to go, Flannery was accepted for a coveted place in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She went there with the intention of studying journalism. However, under the tutelage of Paul Engel, Flannery turned to fiction. Engel was her greatest supporter. He wrote that O'Connor could walk past a pool hall and describe every sight, sound and smell that emanated from the place.
O'Connor landed a contract with Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich for her first novel, "Wise Blood." Because she wrote at a snail's pace and constantly revised, edited and redrafted chapter after chapter, the first novel was seven years in production. HB&J lost interest. However, Robert Giroux had left Harcourt and gone to what would eventually become FS&G. Giroux would be the moving force behind the publication of "Wise Blood."
Critics were widely divided in their reception of O'Connor's first novel. During that time, it was not required that reviewers identify themselves. Hiding behind the title of their publications, "The New Yorker" and "Time Magazine" anonymous critics blasted O'Connor's first work. Other reviewers recognized that America had a new and most unusual writer on their hands.
Back home in Milledgeville, Flannery's novel was a quandary in the realm of social reaction. How could Mary Flannery O'Connor, a good young Catholic lady of good family create a character of the nature of Hazel Motes? The obligatory tea parties, which Flannery despised, were given. The question then became what to do with Flannery's book so graciously inscribed to the guests at those tea parties. It was a puzzle. Even the men in town had their own opinion. One physician was heard to say, "Well, I'll tell you one thing. That young woman doesn't know what goes on in a whore house." I suppose that was some small comfort to the more genteel citizens, if that word ever got back to them.
But "Wise Blood" had brought Flannery freedom. She became a member of the Yaddo Artists' colony where she befriended poet Robert Lowell. Robert and Sally Fitzgerald were fast friends. While at Yaddo, Flannery would turn her attention to the short story. It was here that stories such as "The Life You Save May be Your Own" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" began to take shape.
In 1955, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" appeared as an anthology with nine other stories, including her first O.Henry first prize stories. Life for Flannery O'Connor was looking up.
However, Flannery's health was poor. Her mother Regina saw to it that she received all the necessary medical tests. Regina told her she had arthritis. Eventually, Flannery would learn from a friend in whom her mother had confided that it wasn't arthritis, it was Lupus.
It was after O'Connor's discovery of her true illness that Gooch reveals a portrait of a woman who never flinched at the knowledge she had inherited the illness that killed her father. O'Connor rarely let her illness break her routine.
Flannery was up at six, praying Prime from the breviary. She dressed and attended mass. By nine a.m. she was seated at her writing desk in her room at Andalusia. She wrote from nine to noon. By the end of three hours of constant writing, her illness left her fatigued. On those days she felt well, she would receive guests on the porch of Andalusia approximately 3:30 till 5p.m.
O'Connor entered the lecture circuit constantly appearing at colleges and writers' forums discussing such topics as "The Catholic Southern Writer," "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," and other similar topics her works had given rise to question.
During it all, Flannery thought she had found time for love. The Librarians, bless their hearts, had seen fit to introduce a young Dane, Erik Lankgjear, a text book salesman on the southern route. Erik became known as Flannery's boyfriend. However, he had other plans. Eventually, he returned to Denmark, delayed his return ostensibly for extended studies in literature, and finally sent Flannery and engagement notice announcing his forthcoming marriage. Flannery graciously responded she would welcome him and his bride in hers and her mother's home.
Although no one can know for sure, Flannery was kissed once and only once by the traveling book salesman. He found it less than pleasing. And, yes. He kissed and told. In an interview with Christopher O'Hare, Langkjear said, "As our lips touched I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no real muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori>...So I had the feeling of kissing a skeleton." Ah, how gallant.
Living and writing in relative isolation from the time she discovered she was suffering from Lupus, O'Connor never stopped working. She frequently traveled, lecturing English Literature Students, and was a regular guest at the Cheney residence in Nashville, Tennessee, where she rubbed elbows with Robert Penn Warren, whom she called "Red." Peter Taylor, Allen Tate and others were regular readers for O'Connor. She delighted in performing "A Good Man is Hard to Find."
In 2007 O'Connor's private letters were released, providing Brad Gooch with a wealth of information previously unknown about O'Connor's life, philosophy, and her creative process. Brad Gooch was a patient biographer. He held off attempting to write this biography out of respect for Sally Fitzgerald who claimed she intended on publishing her biography of O'Connor. Yet, when Fitzgerald died at age 83, no manuscript was found. Gooch's work was well worth the wait.
Above everything else, Gooch has shown us the living human being behind a relatively short collection of work. And he has shown us how other well known authors perceived her. We have her opinions of them as well.
Pointing to his copy of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," William Faulkner exclaimed, "Now that's some good stuff." Carson McCullers despised her. Flannery's feeling for McCullers was on par. Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams made her plumb sick.
When it was suggested to T.S. Eliot that he should publish "A Good Man is Hard to Find" in England, he dutifully read the book and declined. Eliot responded his nerves just couldn't take Miss O'Connor. Well, keep calm and carry on.
Under the surface of Flannery O'Connor's writing life lie her feelings for her domineering mother. One friend, when asked what Flannery would do without her mother replied she'd be lost. She'd lose half her material. No doubt, Flannery killed off her mother repeatedly in various and sundry ways through a number of stories.
Regina is the stand in for the grandmother who would have been a good woman if there'd have been somebody there to shoot her every day. After Regina converted Andalusia from a dairy farm to a beef farm, Flannery wrote her O.Henry prize winning "Green Leaf," wherein the protagonist lady farmer is gored to death by one of her prized bulls. When asked how her mother would feel about her numerous demises within the pages of Flannery's stories, she blithely remarked, "Oh, she never reads my stuff."
Shortly before her death, editor Robert Giroux visited Flannery and Regina at Andalusia. Giroux was net at the gate by mother and daughter. Flannery's tremendous flock of peacocks and pea fowl made the journey to the house seem interminable. That evening at the dinner table, Regina asked Giroux, "Isn't there some way you might get Flannery to right about nice people?" Flannery found no humor in the conversation.
O'Connor was well aware of the potential of violence in humanity. Her philosophy regarding such frank depictions of it was that people for the most part were so inured to its occurrence that they had to be slapped in the face to see it and do something about it. She and Peckinpaugh most likely would have gotten along famously.
Flannery completed one of her finest stories, "Revelation" close to the time of her death. In her hospital bed she kept a notebook in which she was penning her last story, "Parker's Back." These and other stories were published posthumously in her final anthology, "Everything That Rises Must Converge."
Flannery O'Connor died August 3, 1964. She was thirty-nine years old. She was buried the next day at Memory Hill Cemetery in Millidgeville, Georgia. Today, Andalusia is a public shrine. Whether one will find any chickens that walk backward is a question that one must determine alone.
In 1971, Robert Giroux published "The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor." It won the National Book Award in 1972. Robert Giroux accepted the award on her behalf. Backstage a celebrated author, whom Gooch had the good grace not to name, complained to Giroux,"Do you really think Flannery O'Connor was a great writer? She's such a Roman Catholic." Giroux responded, "I'm surprised at you, to misjudge her so completely. If she were here, she'd set you straight. She'd impress you. You'd have a hard time out-talking her."
In truth, O'Connor would have said, "Whoever invented cocktail parties should be drawn and quartered."
In 1988, the Library of America chose Flannery O'Connor as the first author born in the 20th Century who works would be published in this canonical selection of writings. That book stays on my bedside table.
June 2, 2015
While I am not an avid fan of Flannery O’Connor’s work, I do recognize that she was one of the best American writers of short fiction. This book is the story of a gifted and complicated woman who was determined to persevere despite her differences and her disability, which cut her life short.
The book begins with the image of a five year old Flannery and her chickens being filmed by Pathe Newsreel Company. Why film this? Because how many little girls do you know who could teach chickens to walk backwards? Only Flannery could do that. She had a love of birds and later raised peacocks.
She was born in Savannah, Georgia and the only child of Edward O’Connor (unsuccessful real estate agent) and his wife, Regina. 1n 1937 her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus and which led to his death in 1941. Flannery, 15 years old, was devastated. She lived reclusively with her mother at Andalusia, the family farm in Milledgeville, Ga.
After graduating high school, she went to Georgia State College for Woman. She had a brief stint as a cartoonist at the College and graduated with a degree in Social Science. In 1946 she was accepted in the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first went to study journalism. While there she got to know several important writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Robie Macauley, Austin Warren and Andrew Lytle. Some of her stories and cartoons were published in the Sewanee Review. In 1949, she stayed with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald in Redding, CT. She propelled herself at the Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. When she went to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, she said, she “didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper.” Yet she quickly became a star there and “scared the boys to death with her irony,” as a teacher put it.
In 1951, she was she was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, and returned home to her ancestral farm, Andalusia, in GA. She was given crutches, started with hair loss, and a “watermelon” face. She stated, “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense, sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” O’Connor was deeply religious. She was a devout Catholic, a strange thing to be in Georgia. From the very beginning of her life she was already an outsider. Along with her fatal illness, her other main influence was God. Right to the end, she attended daily mass at 7am, fifth pew on the right. “Although she was a devout Catholic, almost all of her characters, haunted, tested, and redeemed, are Protestant.” Although she was expected to live only five more years, she managed fourteen. In 1964 Flannery O’Connor, died at the age of 39. She had published thirty-one stories and two novels. Reading this book was very inspiring to me, since I live with the same diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus.
The book begins with the image of a five year old Flannery and her chickens being filmed by Pathe Newsreel Company. Why film this? Because how many little girls do you know who could teach chickens to walk backwards? Only Flannery could do that. She had a love of birds and later raised peacocks.
She was born in Savannah, Georgia and the only child of Edward O’Connor (unsuccessful real estate agent) and his wife, Regina. 1n 1937 her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus and which led to his death in 1941. Flannery, 15 years old, was devastated. She lived reclusively with her mother at Andalusia, the family farm in Milledgeville, Ga.
After graduating high school, she went to Georgia State College for Woman. She had a brief stint as a cartoonist at the College and graduated with a degree in Social Science. In 1946 she was accepted in the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first went to study journalism. While there she got to know several important writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Robie Macauley, Austin Warren and Andrew Lytle. Some of her stories and cartoons were published in the Sewanee Review. In 1949, she stayed with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald in Redding, CT. She propelled herself at the Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. When she went to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, she said, she “didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper.” Yet she quickly became a star there and “scared the boys to death with her irony,” as a teacher put it.
In 1951, she was she was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, and returned home to her ancestral farm, Andalusia, in GA. She was given crutches, started with hair loss, and a “watermelon” face. She stated, “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense, sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” O’Connor was deeply religious. She was a devout Catholic, a strange thing to be in Georgia. From the very beginning of her life she was already an outsider. Along with her fatal illness, her other main influence was God. Right to the end, she attended daily mass at 7am, fifth pew on the right. “Although she was a devout Catholic, almost all of her characters, haunted, tested, and redeemed, are Protestant.” Although she was expected to live only five more years, she managed fourteen. In 1964 Flannery O’Connor, died at the age of 39. She had published thirty-one stories and two novels. Reading this book was very inspiring to me, since I live with the same diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus.
November 5, 2013
I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place...something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don't sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won't be sitting there.
This piecing together of snippets from Flannery O'Connor's writing life was my favorite takeaway from the biography. The entire narrative reads like a smorgasbord of quotes and correspondence--which at times gets exhaustive. Yet there are many instances where encouraging revelations pierce the narrative.
It was interesting to learn that the idea for this book first came about when the biographer Brad Gooch reached out to Sally Fitzgerald (a family friend of the O'Connor family) and stated his interest in writing the biography and she sort of snuffed him. She was writing a biography that could overlap, she told him, adding that "should she ever feel the need of an assistant" she would think of him. Decades later, still no book. Fitzgerald had died with an unfinished manuscript. So the man who considered O'Connor his favorite fiction writer, decided to write the story of her life.
While the story is partly a sad one because Flannery O'Connor died at age thirty-nine from lupus (a condition in which the immune system forms antibodies that attacks its own connective tissue), it is also an inspirational story. If you like O'Connor's short stories or if you admire stories from the south and love hearing of the intermingling of Southern writers, you would enjoy reading this. It is also the writer's read because you get to see young Flannery develop into a writer: spending time writing at a MFA program and as a writing fellow. She was a feisty recluse who spent so much time perfecting her writing skills, that she was confident in it. You get that writing became her companion: "When she was alone, she would pull down the shades and sit at her typewriter with a pile of yellow paper, writing and rewriting. If she wasn't writing, she was reading."
May 14, 2021
I greatly appreciate this book for helping me understand the strange and brilliant Southern writer Flannery O'Connor a bit better as a person. It didn't make me want to try reading her stories again. Though much praised by people in the know, her fiction about grotesque human gargoyles finding Roman Catholic salvation through horrible deaths is not fiction that will ever work for me. I don't get it.
But the disciplined writer who died at 39 of lupus after many years of struggle with a disease that inspired stories was not someone who can be pigeonholed. I had previously given up on *The Habit of Being* (her collected letters), witty though they were, because by 1954, her racist language was too much for me. So one thing I wanted to understand from the biography was how racist was she? Did she have the same attitudes as the mother with whom an invalid Flannery was obliged to live into adulthood and whom she satirized repeatedly in her fiction?
The writer was too complex for me to answer that categorically, but here are a few things to consider. A monk O'Connor knew said, "I would call her a cultural racist. ... The vocabulary she used was typical Southern white. ... Her mother was worse. Flannery tempered it some. She did not hate black people. But she did resent the whiteys from the North coming down and telling us how to handle our problems with the blacks."
Author Brad Gooch notes that in a number of "letters, many still unpublished ... she turned out to be a connoisseur of racial jokes [with] offensive punch lines." But in 1963, even before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, she wrote a friend, "I feel very good about those changes in the South that have been long overdue -- the whole racial picture." So there's that.
With every indication of being a deep-thinking intellectual, O'Connor could scarcely miss that something was wrong with racial attitudes in the South and in the hypocritical North. But for me it's hard to imagine someone so intellectual going to mass every day and accepting pretty much every notion of the fallible humans who ran the day-to-day of her denomination. I can understand a brilliant person being spiritual, but not her asking a priest anxiously if it was OK to have a broth made of meat during Lent.
The little girl who grew up drawing chickens by starting at the back and the young woman who was crazy about her peacocks -- and other exotic barnyard fowl -- remains a puzzle to this reader.
But the disciplined writer who died at 39 of lupus after many years of struggle with a disease that inspired stories was not someone who can be pigeonholed. I had previously given up on *The Habit of Being* (her collected letters), witty though they were, because by 1954, her racist language was too much for me. So one thing I wanted to understand from the biography was how racist was she? Did she have the same attitudes as the mother with whom an invalid Flannery was obliged to live into adulthood and whom she satirized repeatedly in her fiction?
The writer was too complex for me to answer that categorically, but here are a few things to consider. A monk O'Connor knew said, "I would call her a cultural racist. ... The vocabulary she used was typical Southern white. ... Her mother was worse. Flannery tempered it some. She did not hate black people. But she did resent the whiteys from the North coming down and telling us how to handle our problems with the blacks."
Author Brad Gooch notes that in a number of "letters, many still unpublished ... she turned out to be a connoisseur of racial jokes [with] offensive punch lines." But in 1963, even before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, she wrote a friend, "I feel very good about those changes in the South that have been long overdue -- the whole racial picture." So there's that.
With every indication of being a deep-thinking intellectual, O'Connor could scarcely miss that something was wrong with racial attitudes in the South and in the hypocritical North. But for me it's hard to imagine someone so intellectual going to mass every day and accepting pretty much every notion of the fallible humans who ran the day-to-day of her denomination. I can understand a brilliant person being spiritual, but not her asking a priest anxiously if it was OK to have a broth made of meat during Lent.
The little girl who grew up drawing chickens by starting at the back and the young woman who was crazy about her peacocks -- and other exotic barnyard fowl -- remains a puzzle to this reader.
Read
December 18, 2014O’ Connor is a personal favorite, and this biography captures a great deal of what was both endearing and tragic about a woman who produced some of the most enduring and transformative fiction to emerge from the United States before her death from lupus at age 39. Gooch gives Flannery’s wit, faith, and guarded nature plenty of ink, and in doing so captures what continues to draw so many to her work. And the work – deservedly – remains central throughout. Her stories remained her focus even until the end, and it’s Gooch’s commitment to those stories and the soul that O’ Connor poured into them that makes Flannery such a great portrait of such a great writer.- Josh Corman
From Our Favorite Biographies of Dead Writers: http://bookriot.com/2014/12/18/favori...
From Our Favorite Biographies of Dead Writers: http://bookriot.com/2014/12/18/favori...
on-going
August 26, 2023"The South impresses it's huge image on the Southern writer from the moment he is able to distinguish one sound from another. He takes in it in through his ears and hears it again in his own voice, and, by the time he is able to use his imagination for fiction, he finds his senses respond irrevocably to a certain reality, and particularly to the sound of a certain reality. The Southern writer's greatest tie with the South is through his ear"
January 15, 2010
I'm never certain how to judge biographies, especially when--as is the case with this one--there's not much to compare it to (unlike, say, bios of Sylvia Plath, when there are about four trillion, and most of them are awful). Nevertheless, I think I can safely five-star this one. 'Flannery' has a bit of a slow start, and you think for a moment that perhaps Ms. O'Connor was right--that her personal history wasn't worthy of a biography. But more likely, Gooch simply didn't have a lot of material to work with from her childhood, and the first chapter or so became histories of Milledgeville or O'Connor's ancestry--which, frankly, just wasn't as intriguing to me as she was.
But there are three things, among many, that this biography notably accomplishes: one, Gooch creates an engaging and sensible 'narrative' for her life--the chapters almost work thematically, even though the book is organized chronologically; two, it preserves the complexities of O'Connor's life and her views (particularly on the 'race problem,' the stirrings of the Civil Rights movement in Georgia, as well as her views on homosexuality, particularly through her relationships with Maryat Lee and Betty Hester); and three, it captures the incredible humor O'Connor injects into her bleakest works and allows us to laugh with her, even in the face of seemingly terrible ordeals, while maintaining her dignity through it all.
I don't know about you, but reading a biography is, for me, an opportunity to make a new friend--I truly begin, when a biography is good that is, to feel as though I 'know' the subject of the book. I feel really fortunate to have been able to 'befriend' Flannery for the week or so it took me to work through this. Perhaps more strange is my perpetual sadness when I come to deaths in biographies--this happened with every Plath bio I've read, with Diane Middlebrook's wonderful bio on Anne Sexton, with a work on Emily Bronte--I always seem to feel that something will work out differently, if I've invested enough into their lives. That perhaps this time, Sylvia and Anne won't gas themselves; that Emily won't become ill at Branwell's funeral; that Flannery's lupus won't fatally flare up after her surgery. It's always a shock to come to that moment in a biography, for me, and perhaps that just makes me slightly insane. I'm not sure. But to me, this is also the test of whether or not a biography has succeeded--if I'm so concerned with changing the ending, there must have been something there that held me along the way.
Gooch is a powerful writer, who perhaps has a bit of an agenda, but I think justifiably so. A couple of reviews here have said that they felt he hated Flannery, which is a criticism I couldn't disagree more with. I think Gooch has a great love of her, but manages (quite well, I should add) to balance the affection with a critical distance. As I said, perhaps the most significant accomplishment of this biography is that he brought her back to life, all of her contradictions intact. Not to mention the fact that I was laughing aloud up until mere pages before Flannery died (she evidently referred to Andalusia at this point, with three members of the family rehabilitating in the house, as 'Jolly Corners Rest Home').
In short, it's a great book--even if you're not all that familiar with her work. For instance, I've only read her collection "A Good Man is Hard to Find"--but thankfully, the biography has inspired me to return to those stories and finally get around to the rest of her work (which has sat on my shelves for well nigh a year now) this year. Would have been among my favorite books of last year if I'd finished in time, but it should easily be among my faves for 2010. Highly recommended.
But there are three things, among many, that this biography notably accomplishes: one, Gooch creates an engaging and sensible 'narrative' for her life--the chapters almost work thematically, even though the book is organized chronologically; two, it preserves the complexities of O'Connor's life and her views (particularly on the 'race problem,' the stirrings of the Civil Rights movement in Georgia, as well as her views on homosexuality, particularly through her relationships with Maryat Lee and Betty Hester); and three, it captures the incredible humor O'Connor injects into her bleakest works and allows us to laugh with her, even in the face of seemingly terrible ordeals, while maintaining her dignity through it all.
I don't know about you, but reading a biography is, for me, an opportunity to make a new friend--I truly begin, when a biography is good that is, to feel as though I 'know' the subject of the book. I feel really fortunate to have been able to 'befriend' Flannery for the week or so it took me to work through this. Perhaps more strange is my perpetual sadness when I come to deaths in biographies--this happened with every Plath bio I've read, with Diane Middlebrook's wonderful bio on Anne Sexton, with a work on Emily Bronte--I always seem to feel that something will work out differently, if I've invested enough into their lives. That perhaps this time, Sylvia and Anne won't gas themselves; that Emily won't become ill at Branwell's funeral; that Flannery's lupus won't fatally flare up after her surgery. It's always a shock to come to that moment in a biography, for me, and perhaps that just makes me slightly insane. I'm not sure. But to me, this is also the test of whether or not a biography has succeeded--if I'm so concerned with changing the ending, there must have been something there that held me along the way.
Gooch is a powerful writer, who perhaps has a bit of an agenda, but I think justifiably so. A couple of reviews here have said that they felt he hated Flannery, which is a criticism I couldn't disagree more with. I think Gooch has a great love of her, but manages (quite well, I should add) to balance the affection with a critical distance. As I said, perhaps the most significant accomplishment of this biography is that he brought her back to life, all of her contradictions intact. Not to mention the fact that I was laughing aloud up until mere pages before Flannery died (she evidently referred to Andalusia at this point, with three members of the family rehabilitating in the house, as 'Jolly Corners Rest Home').
In short, it's a great book--even if you're not all that familiar with her work. For instance, I've only read her collection "A Good Man is Hard to Find"--but thankfully, the biography has inspired me to return to those stories and finally get around to the rest of her work (which has sat on my shelves for well nigh a year now) this year. Would have been among my favorite books of last year if I'd finished in time, but it should easily be among my faves for 2010. Highly recommended.
November 28, 2018
I do not know whether this is the best biography of Flannery O Connor but it is certainly an excellent one.
Brad Gooch thoroughly discusses the time line and chronology of events of O Connor's life, giving the reader a deeper understanding of the person behind those disturbing Gothic stories.
We realize that O Connor was not simply making up these stories but was reporting what she saw: in her own family, on the cattle farm she and her widowed mother lived on, and the hired help who populated it.
We gain just how profound her Catholic faith was to her and how seamlessly she weaves that faith into each and every story, yet without preaching or creating pasty, smiley, saints. Flannery's characters are as rough edged as the teeth of a saw. She does not spare the reader the worst human nature has to offer.
It is interesting to me that O Connor created a number of the women characters after her mother. Flannery O Connor was especially close to her father and his untimely death to lupus,a disease that would later claim her own life at 39, left an indelible mark on her. Her mother was an overbearing, narrow-minded Southern gentrified lady, with all the bigoted and racist attitudes her background and era allowed. She trod rough shod over her daughter, who, as she became increasingly sick had to rely more and more on someone who had difficulty in understanding and perhaps even loving her.
Perhaps the lack of affection was mutual. Many of the women in O Connor's stories who came to dastardly ends bore no little resemblance to her mother. A friend voiced concern to Flannery that her mother would surely recognize herself in the stories. O Connor assured her that her mother "Doesn't ever read my stories. They put her to sleep."
Quite the irony for one of America's great writers to be unrecognized by her own family as she lived her unobtrusive life on a remote farm.
Brad Gooch thoroughly discusses the time line and chronology of events of O Connor's life, giving the reader a deeper understanding of the person behind those disturbing Gothic stories.
We realize that O Connor was not simply making up these stories but was reporting what she saw: in her own family, on the cattle farm she and her widowed mother lived on, and the hired help who populated it.
We gain just how profound her Catholic faith was to her and how seamlessly she weaves that faith into each and every story, yet without preaching or creating pasty, smiley, saints. Flannery's characters are as rough edged as the teeth of a saw. She does not spare the reader the worst human nature has to offer.
It is interesting to me that O Connor created a number of the women characters after her mother. Flannery O Connor was especially close to her father and his untimely death to lupus,a disease that would later claim her own life at 39, left an indelible mark on her. Her mother was an overbearing, narrow-minded Southern gentrified lady, with all the bigoted and racist attitudes her background and era allowed. She trod rough shod over her daughter, who, as she became increasingly sick had to rely more and more on someone who had difficulty in understanding and perhaps even loving her.
Perhaps the lack of affection was mutual. Many of the women in O Connor's stories who came to dastardly ends bore no little resemblance to her mother. A friend voiced concern to Flannery that her mother would surely recognize herself in the stories. O Connor assured her that her mother "Doesn't ever read my stories. They put her to sleep."
Quite the irony for one of America's great writers to be unrecognized by her own family as she lived her unobtrusive life on a remote farm.
May 20, 2009
Brad Gooch has written a totally engaging biopic on one of the 20th Century's greatest writers. Flannery herself thought her life too dull to ever have any biographies written about it, but Professor Gooch rewards us with a story both tragic and beautiful.
That Flannery died at age 39 from lupus is one of the greater tragedies in literary history. Much like the talk about Mozart, the mind shudders at the thought of all the work she might have produced had she been allowed to live. Nevertheless, what she left is fantastic.
Gooch delves into O'Connor's early childhood in Savannah, Georgia, as well as giving an overview of her Catholic schooling up to her undergraduate years. From there it's on to the University of Iowa, then Manhattan and Yaddo, where she makes an impression on the likes of Robert Lowell.
Alas it is at this moment where her illness begins to take shape, and like many of her young characters, she is forced to return home to her mother in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she will live out the rest of her days.
Unlike say Jay Parini's recent bio on Faulkner, Professor Gooch does not examine O'Connor's stories in great laser beam fashion. That is, he covers each short story for the most part in a cursory way. This by no means detracts from the biography, and probably helps the general reader. However, those of us who have read and reread O'Connor's work, would appreciate a stronger look at each story, as well as her two novels. No matter, there are books out there that deal exclusively with O'Connor's canon. I guess I'll just have to travel to New Jersey and take one of Professor Gooch's classes at William Paterson University.
This biography on Flannery O'Connor is highly recommended.
That Flannery died at age 39 from lupus is one of the greater tragedies in literary history. Much like the talk about Mozart, the mind shudders at the thought of all the work she might have produced had she been allowed to live. Nevertheless, what she left is fantastic.
Gooch delves into O'Connor's early childhood in Savannah, Georgia, as well as giving an overview of her Catholic schooling up to her undergraduate years. From there it's on to the University of Iowa, then Manhattan and Yaddo, where she makes an impression on the likes of Robert Lowell.
Alas it is at this moment where her illness begins to take shape, and like many of her young characters, she is forced to return home to her mother in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she will live out the rest of her days.
Unlike say Jay Parini's recent bio on Faulkner, Professor Gooch does not examine O'Connor's stories in great laser beam fashion. That is, he covers each short story for the most part in a cursory way. This by no means detracts from the biography, and probably helps the general reader. However, those of us who have read and reread O'Connor's work, would appreciate a stronger look at each story, as well as her two novels. No matter, there are books out there that deal exclusively with O'Connor's canon. I guess I'll just have to travel to New Jersey and take one of Professor Gooch's classes at William Paterson University.
This biography on Flannery O'Connor is highly recommended.
June 27, 2024
The public’s first glimpse of Flannery O’Connor was a 1930 newsreel featuring the five-year old Georgia girl coaxing her celebrity bantam chicken to walk backwards. O’Connor known for her Southern gothic writing, honed an early instinct for literary shock value. The author was as complex as her stories. Born in Savannah Georgia, O’Connor came from a devout Roman Catholic and Southern heritage. She attended mass daily, and devoured medieval theology with a passion matched only by her love for writing. She once wrote to a friend, “I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic . . . I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary and guilt.” Her tragicomic tales contain grotesque characters in “perverse stories” intended to “shock a morally blind world.” In summary, Flannery O’Connor’s works are descriptive of original sin. Biographer Brad Gooch does a superb job of chronicling O’Connor’s life, including her battle with lupus, an autoimmune disease that ultimately took the young writer’s life at the age of thirty-nine. Gooch interweaves excerpts from O'Connor's two novels and thirty-two short stories to accentuate the autobiographical nature of her writing. The biography reminds readers that O’Connor was a brilliant writer, but that her mooring was ultimately in her strong faith which permeated her life and writing.
March 27, 2010
I didn't think it was possible. I didn't think reading about Flannery O'Connor could drag. But I have to admit this is pretty dry biography. The primary reasons, I suppose, are what you'd expect: that her life was limited and shortened by the debilitating lupus that killed her and that she lived her truncated life in quiet Catholic devotion. In her mid-20s when diagnosed with lupus, she returned from New York to live out her remaining years on the farm north of Milledgeville, GA managed by her mother. She was a good woman and a great writer, but there weren't many events in her life for a biographer to engage the reader with, even one as experienced as Brad Gooch. He compensates somewhat by spending a lot of time on O'Connor's childhood. His picture of the South during her growing up, particularly of Savannah, is well done. But in the end her simplicity and withdrawal to the farm apparently challenged him. He was unable to wring much from her story. What's most important is that she left her remarkable stories and novels. One of those, Wise Blood, is a favorite of mine. I'm a little disappointed in this. However, I think Gooch's biography, because it's so comprehensive, may be definitive. There's plenty of room, though, for more criticism. Her work is deserving.
April 15, 2009
The gifted O'Connor once stated that she would merit no biography because "lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy." Brad Gooch, however, has done a thorough job teasing out the details of O'Connor's short life and enduring legacy. Although gracious and polite, Gooch was nonetheless admonished by critics for skimming over some of the more eyebrow-raising aspects of her life, such as the question of her sexuality and her contentious relationship with her mother. Others complained that Gooch neglected to properly analyze O'Connor's work and the genesis of her distinctive style. Perhaps the gifted O'Connor will always elude our attempts to understand her, and readers unfamiliar with the author should turn to her work; however, her fans will come away from Flannery with a enhanced appreciation for her achievements.
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
August 7, 2013
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/5757167...
It is not hard to imagine there being countless more people than I who are complete opposites of Mary Flannery O'Connor. To think she was such a serious Catholic who almost never missed a 7AM mass unless she was sick enough to be in hospital or on her death bed. To imagine she never ever had sex with anyone, and the only time she ever came close was in the awful tooth kiss she had with an early male suitor. At least if we believe the writings of her biographer, Brad Gooch, who portrayed our Miss O'Connor in the most dreadful of terms as if she were a story written for a newspaper flash. The facts went on and on, if they were indeed the facts, and the reportage never ceased to not overwhelm me.
Flannery O'Connor was character enough to overwhelm anyone who got to know her. It is obvious the reader of this biography never will. In my own confession I admit to reading O'Connor only in the company of A Good Man Is Hard To Find and having little interest in reading much else the woman wrote. But that story of The Misfit alone was worth all the tea in China, given that I am not the least concerned with tea or the money I could make off it. Let's just say for the sake of argument that Flannery wasn't interested in men or women sexually, that she was obsessed with her bible and theological studies, and the birds and her mother gave her all the attention she actually required. Let's say that writing gave her the impetus to go on living. That fame was a fleeting romance she never wanted to advance past the occasional lecture or public reading of her work required by her publishers. But what kind of story is that? And remember, Flannery herself said her life wouldn't be one for biographers anyway as all it mostly consisted of was her daily round trip from the steps off her kitchen onto the path toward the hen house.
Her biographer, Brad Gooch, has been acclaimed and his work featured in numerous magazines. He is a professor of English at William Paterson University. He earned his PhD at Columbia University. But he writes like a lady wannabe all made up in furs and dangling gaudy jewelry. I felt as if I was reading a society gossip column instead of an academic work of high stature. Gooch was even pretentious enough to use the ghastly word "genuflected" at least twice too many times. In previous criticism of other works I have argued how necessary it is for the writer of creative non-fiction to invest something of himself in the book, to make it personal. Writers such as Paul Hendrickson (Hemingway's Boat) would have been a better choice for a more compelling and interesting story about Flannery O'Connor. At the very least the sex would have been better.
One example regards the relationship between O'Connor and Erik Langkjaer. Their relationship was becoming quite intimate according to this biographer. From the quoted words of Langkjaer we learn that Flannery was remarkably inexperienced sexually for a woman of her age. She was quite prepared to receive a kiss from Erik when he initially made his advance to do so. But what he found was a feeling as if kissing a skeleton. The woman was stiff, her mouth lacked resilience, and his own lips touched her teeth rather than her lips. They were interrupted by a stray couple from a nearby parked car who poked their heads in, which Flannery seemed to be overjoyed in with the disturbance. Needless to say the relationship between the couple was different from then on, and Erik Langkjaer went on to marry someone else and keep a geographical distance from O'Connor though they remained pen pals for some time after the awkward incident. But why didn't Gooch handle the story better? Surely there are anecdotes regarding all her intimate relationships that Gooch could have researched and offered another point of view. There was nothing of Gooch in this book and that is where he failed. The biographer has to have a stake in what he is writing about. He has to make it personal.
After reading this book, Flannery O'Connor remains for me at least as large a mystery now as she was before I started. This book was basically straight reporting, and how reliable it is could be debatable. She obviously had a few friends who could have offered more had their own stories been brought to the page as Paul Hendrickson is want to do with the subjects he chooses to write and learn about. But Brad Hooch obviously doesn't care about his subject. But he'll take the acclaim and the rewards that the literati deems fitting for an academic the stature of a Brad Hooch, which isn't saying much for the rest of the serious, and more creative, literary world. Some might say I am being too harsh with Brad Hooch, but I am harsh with others and Brad Hooch does not get special treatment from me because of somebody else's agenda which may or may not hurt me. And for the record I have been equally hard on another biographer much more highly respected than the anointed Brad Hooch. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, gave us straight reportage, and though Isaacson had a very interesting subject who could, and did, carry the book just on his own terms and face of who he was, Isaacson did nothing creative in the telling of the more complex story possible. In other words, Isaacson put nothing of himself on the page. He never got personal. I have been also equally harsh with translators such as the well-known editor, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi who translated the poems of Eugenio Montale brilliantly but can't write a poem of his own worth salt. Or how about the translator George Zsirtes whom I think brilliant in his work on Laszlo Krasznahorkai but awful in his translation of Sandor Marai?
Fact is, I want more. I want a new biography of Flannery O'Connor that makes me want to read her propaganda, something solid that makes me believe in her church, more proof that we all are sinners, and that sex is bad or it isn't, or that having friends is even worse. Yes, give me that book and I will write a favorable review of it.
It is not hard to imagine there being countless more people than I who are complete opposites of Mary Flannery O'Connor. To think she was such a serious Catholic who almost never missed a 7AM mass unless she was sick enough to be in hospital or on her death bed. To imagine she never ever had sex with anyone, and the only time she ever came close was in the awful tooth kiss she had with an early male suitor. At least if we believe the writings of her biographer, Brad Gooch, who portrayed our Miss O'Connor in the most dreadful of terms as if she were a story written for a newspaper flash. The facts went on and on, if they were indeed the facts, and the reportage never ceased to not overwhelm me.
Flannery O'Connor was character enough to overwhelm anyone who got to know her. It is obvious the reader of this biography never will. In my own confession I admit to reading O'Connor only in the company of A Good Man Is Hard To Find and having little interest in reading much else the woman wrote. But that story of The Misfit alone was worth all the tea in China, given that I am not the least concerned with tea or the money I could make off it. Let's just say for the sake of argument that Flannery wasn't interested in men or women sexually, that she was obsessed with her bible and theological studies, and the birds and her mother gave her all the attention she actually required. Let's say that writing gave her the impetus to go on living. That fame was a fleeting romance she never wanted to advance past the occasional lecture or public reading of her work required by her publishers. But what kind of story is that? And remember, Flannery herself said her life wouldn't be one for biographers anyway as all it mostly consisted of was her daily round trip from the steps off her kitchen onto the path toward the hen house.
Her biographer, Brad Gooch, has been acclaimed and his work featured in numerous magazines. He is a professor of English at William Paterson University. He earned his PhD at Columbia University. But he writes like a lady wannabe all made up in furs and dangling gaudy jewelry. I felt as if I was reading a society gossip column instead of an academic work of high stature. Gooch was even pretentious enough to use the ghastly word "genuflected" at least twice too many times. In previous criticism of other works I have argued how necessary it is for the writer of creative non-fiction to invest something of himself in the book, to make it personal. Writers such as Paul Hendrickson (Hemingway's Boat) would have been a better choice for a more compelling and interesting story about Flannery O'Connor. At the very least the sex would have been better.
One example regards the relationship between O'Connor and Erik Langkjaer. Their relationship was becoming quite intimate according to this biographer. From the quoted words of Langkjaer we learn that Flannery was remarkably inexperienced sexually for a woman of her age. She was quite prepared to receive a kiss from Erik when he initially made his advance to do so. But what he found was a feeling as if kissing a skeleton. The woman was stiff, her mouth lacked resilience, and his own lips touched her teeth rather than her lips. They were interrupted by a stray couple from a nearby parked car who poked their heads in, which Flannery seemed to be overjoyed in with the disturbance. Needless to say the relationship between the couple was different from then on, and Erik Langkjaer went on to marry someone else and keep a geographical distance from O'Connor though they remained pen pals for some time after the awkward incident. But why didn't Gooch handle the story better? Surely there are anecdotes regarding all her intimate relationships that Gooch could have researched and offered another point of view. There was nothing of Gooch in this book and that is where he failed. The biographer has to have a stake in what he is writing about. He has to make it personal.
After reading this book, Flannery O'Connor remains for me at least as large a mystery now as she was before I started. This book was basically straight reporting, and how reliable it is could be debatable. She obviously had a few friends who could have offered more had their own stories been brought to the page as Paul Hendrickson is want to do with the subjects he chooses to write and learn about. But Brad Hooch obviously doesn't care about his subject. But he'll take the acclaim and the rewards that the literati deems fitting for an academic the stature of a Brad Hooch, which isn't saying much for the rest of the serious, and more creative, literary world. Some might say I am being too harsh with Brad Hooch, but I am harsh with others and Brad Hooch does not get special treatment from me because of somebody else's agenda which may or may not hurt me. And for the record I have been equally hard on another biographer much more highly respected than the anointed Brad Hooch. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, gave us straight reportage, and though Isaacson had a very interesting subject who could, and did, carry the book just on his own terms and face of who he was, Isaacson did nothing creative in the telling of the more complex story possible. In other words, Isaacson put nothing of himself on the page. He never got personal. I have been also equally harsh with translators such as the well-known editor, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi who translated the poems of Eugenio Montale brilliantly but can't write a poem of his own worth salt. Or how about the translator George Zsirtes whom I think brilliant in his work on Laszlo Krasznahorkai but awful in his translation of Sandor Marai?
Fact is, I want more. I want a new biography of Flannery O'Connor that makes me want to read her propaganda, something solid that makes me believe in her church, more proof that we all are sinners, and that sex is bad or it isn't, or that having friends is even worse. Yes, give me that book and I will write a favorable review of it.
August 13, 2016
Not a cultural biography in that Gooch never broadened his focus to describe the context of O'Connor's times and milieu (except in the cursory paragraphs about Catholic theology, the Deep South, and race-relations), and little or no discussion of O'Connor's writing (except for the inspirations for stories/novels and work habits). As such it was a fast read of names, dates, and places, leaving me helplessly armed with new trivia about O'Connor's friendships, her difficult mother, her devotion to writing, her love of peafowl, and, unfortunately, her closed-mindedness. This last troubles me, and I need to to reconcile my new feelings with my prior conception of her (the one I formed reading her in college). It's similar to having one's image of an author slightly dashed by attending an author-reading or lecture - I'll get over it once I remember how much more complicated we are than can be captured in a literary biography or a first impression on a particular night in a life. Her wisdom shines in the stories and novels. But I wish I'd just sat down with Paul Elie's group cultural/religious biography of Percy, Merton, Day, and O'Connor, which is on my to-read list. To begin Wise Blood in a few days for a book discussion.
June 13, 2015
I checked this book out of the library three times but never did finish reading it. Each time I tried to force myself to read more, ennui set in immediately. When a biographer's subject has led a particularly sheltered, uneventful, and dull life, there is only so much that the writer can do to spunk up that particular life without changing the work to fiction. This biographer stays in the realm of nonfiction, but the price for doing so causes the reader to become numbed by the overbearing number of details of Ms. O'Connor's daily life that do nothing more than fill the book's pages with words. The only detail missing is the number of trips that Ms. O'Connor made to the toilet each day of her life.
This book was a huge disappointment because Ms. O'Connor's writing is original, unpredictable, and thought provoking. I assumed that her personal life would be reflective of her writing. Alas, they are polar opposites. After reading how dull her real life was, I can only admire Ms. O'Connor's creativity and outside-the-box writing all the more.
This book was a huge disappointment because Ms. O'Connor's writing is original, unpredictable, and thought provoking. I assumed that her personal life would be reflective of her writing. Alas, they are polar opposites. After reading how dull her real life was, I can only admire Ms. O'Connor's creativity and outside-the-box writing all the more.
April 11, 2010
i often make the mistake of thinking that just because i love an author's writing i'd love to read about them. a biography is not an easy thing to write when a weighty tome of the author's own letters exists and sadly i don't think gooch did much more than consolidate those with some biographical facts. i don't feel any closer to flannery, nor did any of her searing wit that i so admire come through this book.
okay, i'll also admit that much of my dislike is attributed to the series of disasters i had borrowing this as an ebook from the library. but still, i'd have much rather made a more valiant effort to get through the habits of being than to have been swayed by the beautiful cover of this book.
okay, i'll also admit that much of my dislike is attributed to the series of disasters i had borrowing this as an ebook from the library. but still, i'd have much rather made a more valiant effort to get through the habits of being than to have been swayed by the beautiful cover of this book.
February 27, 2009
Probably as good a biography of Flannery O'Connor as we're ever going to get, but very little in the way of deep insights -- which is not to fault Brad Gooch; O'Connor was a very private person and Gooch has covered the ground as well as anyone ever will. In a perfect world, Gooch would annotate a new edition of Sally Fitzgerald's book of O'Connor's correspondence, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, which would become essentially the only thing you would need to read on O'Connor beyond the work.
March 12, 2020
I feel like this book is oddly distant from Flannery O'Connor. People enter her life and I would lose track quickly of who they were. Considering she has a book of her letters published, I was surprised by how little I would read from O'Connor herself. I'm going to check out The Habit of Being instead. I read a sample of the book of letters and found that the editor gives context for what is going on in O'Connor's life in each section, and she adds potentially confusing information in brackets for clarity.
September 8, 2009
I'm a big fan of MFOC from way back and this book really elegantly and smoothly gave the what on the who that was Ms O'Connor...
he has a light touch, which is quite a grace, and is smoothly readable and very informative. She is a notoriously tricky writer and so getting his take on her spirituality, race relations, work ethic, irony and wickedly cracked and wise personality was a joy.
Very much what you want a biography to be
he has a light touch, which is quite a grace, and is smoothly readable and very informative. She is a notoriously tricky writer and so getting his take on her spirituality, race relations, work ethic, irony and wickedly cracked and wise personality was a joy.
Very much what you want a biography to be
June 17, 2009
Probably the finest biography I've read of anyone. This book is a must for O'Connor fans.
October 15, 2017
It took me a while to get through this book and while it wasn't exactly gripping, it made me fall in love with Flannery. She is one of the most important American authors who stands in a genre of her own making. There is no one like her. I admired her stories, but this biography made me admire her.
Likely to no one's surprise she was a unique and singular person. Both shy and independent, she didn't care about social norms growing up in the deep south. She would rather be doing her own thing than showing up at any social event at school or university. She loved talking intently one-on-one with friends, but would give the cold shoulder to those she didn't care for. More then that, early on she discovered a calling for her life - to write. She knew she could be good, she just didn't know whether anyone else would appreciate her writing.
As opportunities and mentors expanded her world, she carefully worked on crafting her stories. Her writing process involved rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting. I don't think there was ever a more careful writer. And as her popularity grew, so did her desire to set the record straight on what her stories were really about. (They aren't simple stories, and people interpret them in wildly different ways.) So she began to give lectures on her writing, on being a Catholic in a Protestant south, and how faith directed her writing.
She all of this while grappling with lupus - a disease then that was fatal - and living with her racist and controlling mother who didn't understand her work. She made a place for herself by putting her energy towards theology and her faith, her writing, and then welcoming friends into her and her mother's home. The friendships she did have were robust and thoughtful. Her quirky sense of humor shows up in one of her short stories where she skewers the boyfriend who jilted her as well as herself.
While her stories are gothic and often hard to read because of the violence and darkness in them, Flannery was out to prove that even in the darkest moments of this broken life, grace can break through. Her own life wasn't easy, but grace broke through it too.
She lived a quiet, sickly life, but out of it wrote some of the most well regarded short stories ever written. She wrote those stories as an outworking of her faith, knowing that many people wouldn't understand the deeper meanings of her stories. All of this made me admire the person behind her writing. I also want to re-read some of her work as I feel like I will appreciate it even more now.
Likely to no one's surprise she was a unique and singular person. Both shy and independent, she didn't care about social norms growing up in the deep south. She would rather be doing her own thing than showing up at any social event at school or university. She loved talking intently one-on-one with friends, but would give the cold shoulder to those she didn't care for. More then that, early on she discovered a calling for her life - to write. She knew she could be good, she just didn't know whether anyone else would appreciate her writing.
As opportunities and mentors expanded her world, she carefully worked on crafting her stories. Her writing process involved rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting. I don't think there was ever a more careful writer. And as her popularity grew, so did her desire to set the record straight on what her stories were really about. (They aren't simple stories, and people interpret them in wildly different ways.) So she began to give lectures on her writing, on being a Catholic in a Protestant south, and how faith directed her writing.
She all of this while grappling with lupus - a disease then that was fatal - and living with her racist and controlling mother who didn't understand her work. She made a place for herself by putting her energy towards theology and her faith, her writing, and then welcoming friends into her and her mother's home. The friendships she did have were robust and thoughtful. Her quirky sense of humor shows up in one of her short stories where she skewers the boyfriend who jilted her as well as herself.
While her stories are gothic and often hard to read because of the violence and darkness in them, Flannery was out to prove that even in the darkest moments of this broken life, grace can break through. Her own life wasn't easy, but grace broke through it too.
She lived a quiet, sickly life, but out of it wrote some of the most well regarded short stories ever written. She wrote those stories as an outworking of her faith, knowing that many people wouldn't understand the deeper meanings of her stories. All of this made me admire the person behind her writing. I also want to re-read some of her work as I feel like I will appreciate it even more now.
October 1, 2021
"In her front room at Andalusia, rewriting some final words while 'the grim reaper' waited, she stuck in a last wink and a smirk, not just to Caroline Gordon and Robert Giroux, but to that one reader she claimed she would be happy with 'in a hundred years.'"
I first read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in a packet for a writing workshop I was going to attend and Flannery O'Connor never let me go after that. It's hard to verbalize the complicated, grounded pride I feel for a complicated Southern writer like her, but it is pride, for the most part, and that's a sensation I feel Gooch captures. His picture of O'Connor is affectionate but realistic. If you didn't pick it up from That One Short Story Title Of Hers, she could be pretty racist, and Gooch doesn't shy away from it or, mostly, try to excuse it, except where he maybe overemphasizes that her mother was worse. She also didn't have much nice to say about Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams - while her era-typical homophobia was not especially surprising, her kindness to two separate women who admitted their queerness to her was. She wasn't perfect and she wasn't heinous; I enjoyed getting a clearer idea of her, as flawed as that idea is.
(personally I think it's funny that so much of Flannery's illness was taken up with taking prednisone, and while I'm reading her biography I couldn't write or type for a week because of what I'm pretty sure was a reaction to prednisone that completely stoved up my hands. wild.)
It also reminded me that I never read The Violent Bear It Away. Unfortunately I kind of don't want to. But now I do want to go back and reread "Revelation" (I wrote a pretty good paper on it in college) and "A Good Man," and maybe "The River." Maybe just all of Converge. What Flannery does with her lack of commas is nothing short of artwork, and it was funny to see that at play in her correspondence, too. Usually correspondence in a biography is dull, but Gooch uses it to show her personality so well, he actually made me want to read The Habit of Being.
I first read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in a packet for a writing workshop I was going to attend and Flannery O'Connor never let me go after that. It's hard to verbalize the complicated, grounded pride I feel for a complicated Southern writer like her, but it is pride, for the most part, and that's a sensation I feel Gooch captures. His picture of O'Connor is affectionate but realistic. If you didn't pick it up from That One Short Story Title Of Hers, she could be pretty racist, and Gooch doesn't shy away from it or, mostly, try to excuse it, except where he maybe overemphasizes that her mother was worse. She also didn't have much nice to say about Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams - while her era-typical homophobia was not especially surprising, her kindness to two separate women who admitted their queerness to her was. She wasn't perfect and she wasn't heinous; I enjoyed getting a clearer idea of her, as flawed as that idea is.
(personally I think it's funny that so much of Flannery's illness was taken up with taking prednisone, and while I'm reading her biography I couldn't write or type for a week because of what I'm pretty sure was a reaction to prednisone that completely stoved up my hands. wild.)
It also reminded me that I never read The Violent Bear It Away. Unfortunately I kind of don't want to. But now I do want to go back and reread "Revelation" (I wrote a pretty good paper on it in college) and "A Good Man," and maybe "The River." Maybe just all of Converge. What Flannery does with her lack of commas is nothing short of artwork, and it was funny to see that at play in her correspondence, too. Usually correspondence in a biography is dull, but Gooch uses it to show her personality so well, he actually made me want to read The Habit of Being.
October 29, 2023
Before I embarked on the project I dubbed "Flantober" at the start of this month--wherein I read The Complete Stories and this biography in an attempt to really dig into one of my favorite writer's life and work--I had much the same image of Flannery O'Connor that most people do: a reclusive, embittered writer whose life was ruled by the disease that eventually ended it. I love how this biography turned that popular misconception completely on its head.
Flannery defies every attempt to categorize her as either unimpeachable or irredeemably "problematic;" she was a complicated, loving, flawed, sheltered, brilliant person whose beliefs evolved throughout her life, and I think Brad Gooch does a really thorough and respectful job here, though I wish he'd spent just a little more time on the (difficult and unflattering) complexities of her thoughts on race.
I loved savoring this book over the course of the month, and it works REALLY well in companionship with her complete stories. I highly recommend reading a story or two each day while working through this biography; it was a great way to see how her work was influenced by the circumstances of her life at any given time. It really complicates the (incorrect, and boring, but nevertheless enduringly popular) assumption that all of her stories are just grotesque Catholic morality tales.
Flannery defies every attempt to categorize her as either unimpeachable or irredeemably "problematic;" she was a complicated, loving, flawed, sheltered, brilliant person whose beliefs evolved throughout her life, and I think Brad Gooch does a really thorough and respectful job here, though I wish he'd spent just a little more time on the (difficult and unflattering) complexities of her thoughts on race.
I loved savoring this book over the course of the month, and it works REALLY well in companionship with her complete stories. I highly recommend reading a story or two each day while working through this biography; it was a great way to see how her work was influenced by the circumstances of her life at any given time. It really complicates the (incorrect, and boring, but nevertheless enduringly popular) assumption that all of her stories are just grotesque Catholic morality tales.
February 18, 2024
Brad Gooch has seamlessly woven Flannery O'Connors entire life (including the years prior when her parents met and married and the years following her death) together with her writing, theology, relationships, and painful struggles with Lupus. I especially enjoyed the way he wrote her family background, impressing upon the readers that she comes from a large and long line of strong, Catholic women, deeply imbedded in Deep South Georgia, and deeply impacting Flannery's beliefs and writing.
I read the book in only a few days with a fascinated zeal, learning about the life of an author I admire and her struggles with both life, pain, and writing, while simultaneously laughing at her wry humor and her subtly bold defiance of the norm (and her mother). I also enjoyed the single sentence that stated, with no explanation, that Flannery smuggled 3 chicks on a plane from Georgia to Connecticut.😂
I read the book in only a few days with a fascinated zeal, learning about the life of an author I admire and her struggles with both life, pain, and writing, while simultaneously laughing at her wry humor and her subtly bold defiance of the norm (and her mother). I also enjoyed the single sentence that stated, with no explanation, that Flannery smuggled 3 chicks on a plane from Georgia to Connecticut.😂
December 14, 2021
This was a beautiful book. I picked it up to gain some background information on O'Connor for a class and ended up being so absorbed that I was tearing up at the end. The author weaves together Flannery's letters, conversations, prayers, friendships, and stories into an intimate tapestry of her life. His research was impeccably detailed and his writing often humorous. Now, going back through Flannery's stories, I feel like I'm getting so much more out of them and have a clearer connection to Flannery's voice. You know it's good writing when you can't put a biography down! 10/10 would recommend to anyone who likes O'Connor or has been wanting to get into her.
December 11, 2024
I have not read any of O’Connor’s book or short stories or the many articles she wrote. She was a devout Catholic, and she wrote of her life in the South. The characters in her stories were broadly based on events and people in her life. Her life was controlled for many years by Lupus. Her father passed from the same disease. She dearly loved him, and her mother outlived her. Their’s was a unique relationship, very different individuals. I found the reading pretty dry.
May 22, 2017
Flannery is a excellent author, but this book falls short of doing her justice. Also, the author randomly switches into his own prose, narrating pivotal scenes of O'Connors life in a way that seems fake and out of place.
Still, I always enjoy learning more about the people I admire.
Still, I always enjoy learning more about the people I admire.
August 18, 2017
The bio was good, but not quite as intriguing as Flannery's work itself. A good Catholic girl at heart, no telling what O'Connor would have gone on to accomplish had she not died prematurely at 39 of Lupus.
January 14, 2021
I liked it very much. It does not address the current controversy about O'Connor's alleged racism, but it does a great job of giving the reader a sense of what made her into the person and the author she was.
July 19, 2017
Criminy, what a boring bio. As if to compensate for Flannery O'Connor's short life (the author succumbed to Lupus at the age of 39), Brad Gooch seemed determined to flesh out this book by minutely describing every bit of correspondence, every meeting, even the architectural details of every home and school she ever stepped in. Not my cup of mint julep, I'm afraid.
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