All right, I want you to picture something. The
year is 1932. We're in Savannah, Georgia. It's
hot, I'm sure. The depression is really starting
to bite down. But in one specific backyard, something,
well, something truly odd is happening. Yeah,
something you wouldn't expect. There's this six
-year -old girl, and she is laser -focused on
training a chicken. And just to be clear, we're
not talking about teaching it to, you know...
tech on command or something normal like that
no not at all she is teaching this chicken how
to walk backward it's such a bizarre incredible
image and the thing is this wasn't just some
private childhood quirk and actually got noticed
who did path i news the old newsreel company
they actually sent a film crew to her house they
filmed a little segment called little mary o
'connor with her and this bantam chicken literally
walking in reverse across the yard. It's just
amazing. And decades later, when this little
girl was a full -grown woman and one of the most
important and challenging American writers of
her century, she looked back at that moment.
With that classic wit of hers. Exactly. She said,
I was just there to assist the chicken, but it
was the high point in my life. Everything since
has been an anticlimax. And that quote, I mean,
that's it. That's the perfect key to unlock everything
we're going to get into today in this deep dive
on Mary Flannery O 'Connor. It says so much.
It really does. You get her humor, which was
always incredibly dry and dark. But you also
get her fascination with the strange, the thing
that goes against the grain. That backward walking
chicken is the perfect metaphor for her entire
career. She was someone who looked at the world,
well... In reverse. She came at reality from
a completely different angle. A completely different
angle. And she found the surreal, the grotesque
right smack in the middle of everyday life. So
that's what today is all about. We're going to
try and understand that angle. We're unpacking
the life, the mind, the work of Flannery O 'Connor.
born in 1925 and she died tragically in 1964
and our mission really is to figure out how a
devoutly catholic woman living a pretty quiet
secluded life on a farm with her mother in the
very protestant rural south how did she become
the creator of some of the most savage violent
and frankly hilarious fiction of the 20th century
It's a huge paradox, right? That's what keeps
people coming back to her, I think, even 60 years
after her death. She's constantly writing about
things like morality and divine grace, but her
stories are just full of serial killers, con
men, you know, philosophical nihilists, and what
she famously called grotesque characters. And
then there's the personal paradox. She lived
in physical seclusion because of this awful illness,
but her voice on the page is so world -weary,
so tough, so sardonic. It really is. And we've
got a lot of great sources to help us dig into
this. We're looking at her biography, of course,
but also her private letters. That collection,
The Habit of Being, is incredible. We'll also
get into some very recent discoveries, which
I find fascinating, about her visual art. And
even the fact that her unfinished novel was just
published in 2024. Yeah. And we should be clear,
this isn't just going to be a book report. We're
not just listing titles. We really want to get
into the weeds. We need to unpack what she meant
by a term like Christian realism, which is a
phrase that I think can really confuse a modern
reader. Absolutely. We're going to have to look,
you know, head on at the controversy around her
private letters about race, which is complicated.
And frankly, it's uncomfortable. And we want
to explore why she believes so strongly that
grace can change us. But in her words. The change
is painful. The change is painful. That's a line
that really sticks with you. So let's start at
the beginning. See where that worldview came
from. We met her as a six -year -old with a chicken
in Savannah. Let's flesh that out a bit. She
was born Mary Flannery O 'Connor in 1925, an
only child. Right. Her parents were Edward and
Regina. Yeah. And they were of Irish Catholic
descent, which is important. In the South at
that time, being Catholic automatically made
you a bit of an outsider in the largely Protestant
culture. Bit of a displaced person from the start.
In a way, yeah. Her father was a real estate
agent. But if you read her own descriptions of
herself as a child, you don't get the sense of
a, you know, a typical Southern belle in the
making. She later called herself a pigeon -toed
child with a receding chin and a you -leave -me
-alone -or -I'll -bite -you complex. I love that,
the I'll -bite -you complex. It feels like that
never really left her. It just became more...
It absolutely evolved into her literary voice.
She just wasn't interested in pleasing people
ever. But there's a really dark shadow over that
childhood that we just can't skip past. In 1937,
her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus
erythematosus. Lupus? Yeah, it's a brutal autoimmune
disease. Your body's own immune system basically
starts attacking its own tissues. And back then,
in the late 30s, the treatments were, well, they
were almost non -existent. He died in 1941. And
Flannery was only 15. Just 15. It's a foundational
trauma. And as we're going to see, that specific
disease, lupus, it wasn't just a tragedy that
happened to her father. It was a kind of genetic
ghost that was going to come back and completely
define her own life. So after he died, she and
her mother, Regina, they stayed in Milledgeville,
Georgia. That's right. They lived in her mother's
family home in town, which was known as the Klein
Mansion. And then a bit later in 1951, they moved
out to the country to a farm called Andalusia.
And Andalusia is the place most people picture
when they think of her. It is. But before we
get to the farm life and the peacocks and all
of that, we have to look at how she formed herself
as an artist. And this is where things get really
interesting because she didn't just start out
as a writer. She was a visual thinker, first
and foremost. This is one of those details that
kind of gets glossed over in this standard high
school English class version of her life. We
think of writers as people who just live in words,
but she was a cartoonist, a really prolific one.
She was. When she was in college at the Georgia
State College for Women, she was the art editor
for the student newspaper, and she made all these
fantastic linoleum block cartoons. Lino cuts.
For anyone who's done that, you know it's a subtractive
medium. You have to carve the image out of the
block. It really forces a certain kind of style.
It absolutely does. You can't really do subtle
shading or soft edges. It demands strong... bold,
high contrast lines, big blocks of black and
white. And many critics point to this, to this
idiosyncratic style of her cartoons and say it
directly shaped her fiction. Oh, so? She saw
the world as a caricature in a way. She would
find the most distinctive, the most grotesque
feature of a person and exaggerate it to reveal
a deeper truth about them. She even said once,
I don't know how to write, but I can draw. So
when you read her descriptions in her stories,
and she describes a character with a face like
a cabbage or a Bible fieldsman with hollow leg.
That's the cartoonist. Sketching with words.
Exactly. It's the art of using exaggeration not
to lie, but to get at a truth that's maybe hidden
under the surface. If you draw a politician with
a gigantic smiling mouth, you're saying something
true about them. She did the same thing, but
with a person's moral flaws. She'd amplify their
pride or their hypocrisy to make it visible to
the reader. So she graduates in 1945 and she
heads north. She does. She gets into the Iowa
Writers Workshop. Which even then was becoming
a legendary place. Oh, yeah. It was the center
of the literary universe in post -war America.
She actually enrolled to study journalism at
first, but she switched to fiction very quickly.
And the people she's interacting with there,
I mean, it's a who's who. Robert Penn Warren.
John Crow Ransom, Paul Engle. And Paul Engle,
he read her early stuff. He was the first person
to read the drafts of what would eventually become
her first novel, Wise Blood. Yeah. He saw her
talent right away, even though her style was
so different, so, so strange compared to the
polished realism that was popular then. And Iowa
is also where she makes a really key decision
about her identity. She rebrands herself. She
does. She drops her first name, Mary. She apparently
thought Mary O 'Connor sounded too common. Her
exact words were that it sounded like an Irish
wash woman. Whoa. Yeah. She wanted something
that would stand out on the cover of a book,
something memorable. So she becomes simply Flannery
O 'Connor. It's a great name. It's strong. It's
a little ambiguous. It sounds serious. It worked.
It sounds almost severe, which fixed her perfectly.
So she gets her MFA. She spent some time at Yaddo,
the artist's colony up in New York. And then
she ends up living with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald
in Connecticut. And the Fitzgeralds are hugely
important to her story. They are crucial. Robert
Fitzgerald was this brilliant poet and translator
of the Greek classics. If you've ever read The
Odyssey or The Iliad in English, chances are
it was his translation. They became her closest
friends, her editors, and her intellectual sparring
partners. They really understood the deep Catholic
theology that was fielded. But even while she's
up north, surrounded by these East Coast intellectuals,
the style she's developing is just so deeply,
unmistakably Southern. Oh, completely. Which
brings us to that label that always gets attached
to her. Southern Gothic. Right. And people throw
that term around a lot. It can mean anything
from, you know, spooky stories with Spanish moss
to just anything weird that happens south of
the Mason -Dixon line. What did it mean for O
'Connor? Well, she had a really specific, almost
combative relationship with that term. She knew
exactly how people outside the South, especially
in the North, saw her and her work. She had this
fantastic quote about what she called the Northern
reader. I have it right here. It's brilliant.
She said, anything that comes out of the South
is going to be called grotesque by the Northern
reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case
it is going to be called realistic. It's just
such a perfect. cutting observation on regional
bias she's basically saying you guys up north
already think we're a bunch of freaks so when
i write about the freaks you think i'm just reporting
the news But she did embrace that label, the
grotesque. She took it and she ran with it, but
for a very specific purpose. Her characters are,
I mean, they're morally flawed in the extreme.
They're often physically disabled or disfigured,
which reflects her own later experience. They're
often these wild -eyed fundamentalist Protestants.
And the one thing that unites almost all of them
is a complete and total lack of sentimentality.
That word sentimentality, it feels like it was
her ultimate enemy. She seemed to have an almost
physical revulsion to it. She despised it. She
actually once compared sentimentality to pornography.
That's a pretty strong comparison. How do you
get from, say, A schmaltzy movie to pornography.
For her, the logic was that both of them demand
an immediate emotional payoff without any of
the hard work or the reality that's required
to earn it. Sentimentality wants that warm, fuzzy
feeling of connection or grace, but it skips
over all the suffering and messiness of real
life. And pornography. Pornography wants the
feeling of sexual release, but it skips the messiness
and commitment of actual intimacy. For her, both
were cheap. Both were lies. They were shortcuts
that avoided the difficult, grotesque truth of
the human condition. So when the first reviewers
of her work called it brutal or sarcastic or
horror, they were just, they were missing the
point entirely. From her perspective, yes. They
were missing the theology behind it. She always
defended her work by calling it Christian realism.
And I know that sounds like a contradiction in
terms to a lot of people today. Right. When you
hear Christian fiction now, you tend to think
of something very safe, very clean. You know,
a wholesome romance where everyone finds faith
and lives happily ever after. And that is the
exact opposite of what she was doing. She was
fighting against that safe, clean version of
faith. She believed a writer's meaning had to
be embedded in the story, in the action, not
spelled out like a sermon. She saw the world
as fallen. She saw human beings as deeply, deeply
flawed. And she believed that grace. God's grace
was not some warm blanket. It was a disruption.
It was a disruption. It was a terror. It was
a violent force that knocks you off your feet.
Which brings us back to that quote, grace changes
us and the change is painful. Precisely. That's
the engine of all her stories. Violence in an
O 'Connor story is almost never gratuitous. It's
a tool of grace. It's often the only thing powerful
enough to wake a character up from what she called
their moral blindness. These are characters who
are just so stuck. So stuck in their own pride,
their own little social hierarchies, their own
intellectual arrogance, that they need a profound
shock to the system. They need a car crash or
to be attacked by a bull or to meet a murderer
on a dirt road. Something to shatter the ego.
Exactly. Something to shatter that hard shell
of self -satisfaction so they can finally see
reality, see themselves for the first time. So
let's take her most famous story. A good man
is hard to find. Yeah. You have the grandmother,
who is just this wonderfully annoying, manipulative,
self -righteous character. Oh, she's a masterpiece
of annoying characters. And she and her family
run into this escaped convict, the misfit. That
final scene, that moment of pure terror for her.
In O 'Connor's world, that's actually her moment
of salvation. 100%. The misfit is literally holding
a gun on her. Her whole world has collapsed.
All her little social pretensions are useless.
And in that last second, all the nonsense burns
away. She looks at this killer and she has a
moment of genuine human connection. She reaches
out to him and says, why you're one of my babies?
You're one of my own children. It's an incredible
moment of empathy. It's a moment of grace. She
sees him not as a monster, but as another broken
human being just like her. And then he shoots
her three times in the chest. It's so brutal.
And the misfits line afterwards is just chilling.
She would have been a good woman, he says, if
it had been somebody there to shoot her every
minute of her life. It is brutal. But O 'Connor
would say that it's far better to die in a single
moment of truth than to live 100 years in a comfortable
lie. The violence served its purpose. It shocked
her into grace. And this all connects to this
very famous story about her own faith, the one
people call the Eucharist incident. Right, the
literary dinner party story. It's a classic.
She was at a dinner party in New York with a
group of intellectuals, including the writer
Mary McCarthy. And Mary McCarthy was a very prominent,
very secular intellectual, a lapsed Catholic.
Exactly. And somehow the conversation turns to
the Eucharist, the Catholic sacrament, where
the bread and wine are believed to literally
become the body and blood of Christ. And McCarthy,
trying to be sort of diplomatic and polite, says
that she thinks of the Eucharist as a symbol
and a pretty good one at that. And Flannery,
who had probably been sitting there quietly the
whole time. She just lowers the boom. She leans
forward and says flatly, well, if it's a symbol.
To hell with it. If this is symbol, to hell with
it. That one line just explains her entire body
of work. For O 'Connor, things weren't symbols.
They were. The spiritual wasn't an abstraction
floating above the real world. It was embedded
in the real world. The world was, in her words,
charged with God. If the Eucharist is just a
symbol, it's powerless. If her stories are just
metaphors for something else, they're powerless.
She wanted the blood and the dirt and the grace
to be real physical things. She had no time for
abstractions. That intensity is just blazing
through her work. I mean, her output wasn't huge,
but it was so dense. She wrote two novels, Wise
Blood in 1952, and then The Violent Buried Away
in 1960, and then the short story collections.
Right. A Good Man is Hard to Find was published
in 1955, and Everything That Rises Must Converge
came out just after she died in 1965. Later,
they were all collected into the complete stories.
And that collection won the National Book Award
in 1972, posthumously. And not only did it win,
but in a 2009 poll of writers and critics, it
was voted the best book ever to have won the
award. Think about that. That's putting her ahead
of Faulkner, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow. It shows
you the lasting power of those stories. They
don't feel dated. They don't because they're
about things that don't date. human pride, mortality,
the capacity for both cruelty and grace. And
when you really look at the themes, you see she
wasn't just writing about strange people in the
backwoods. She was tackling the biggest social
issues of her day. Take a story like The Displaced
Person. That's really about the Holocaust and
the refugee crisis after World War II. It is.
It's about a Polish refugee, a survivor of the
camps who comes to work on a southern farm. And
the story is a brilliant dissection of how the
locals, the farmhands and the owner react to
him. They can't comprehend the scale of the evil
he's experienced. They're too wrapped up in their
own petty bigotries and social hierarchies to
see the monumental human tragedy standing right
in front of them. And this story, like the title
story from her second collection, Everything
That Rises Must Converge. Yeah. That is directly
about. out racial integration in the South. Directly.
It's this devastating portrait of a generational
conflict. You have an older woman, the mother,
who is just completely stuck in the racist mindset
of the old South. And you have her son, Julian,
who sees himself as this enlightened, progressive
liberal. But O 'Connor doesn't let him off the
hook. Not at all. In fact, she portrays Julian
as being just as flawed as his mother, if not
more so, because his progressivism is all about
his own ego. It's intellectual and abstract.
He wants to teach his mother a lesson. but there's
no love or compassion in it. He's using his supposed
enlightenment as a weapon against her. That seems
to be a recurring target for her. The well -meaning
liberal who thinks they have all the answers.
Oh, she loved to skewer that character. The sociologist,
the do -gooder, the intellectual who comes down
to the rural South with a theory about how to
fix people. In her stories, they fail again and
again because they're operating on what she saw
as a sentimental illusion. The idea that human
beings are basically good and just need to be
educated. Whereas O 'Connor's starting point
was very different. Her starting point was the
doctrine of original sin. She believed people
are fundamentally broken and in desperate need
of salvation, not just education. And you can't
have a conversation about her work without talking
about her own body because her physical reality
took a dramatic turn in 1952. Right when her
career was taking off. Exactly. She was only
27. She'd just published Wise Blood. She was
getting noticed. And then she was diagnosed with
disseminated lupus erythematosus, the very same
disease that had killed her father. And in 1952,
that diagnosis was basically a death sentence.
It was. The doctors told her she had maybe five
years to live. She ended up surviving for 12,
which was a miracle in itself, but it meant her
life of independence was over. She had to move
back home, a forced return to her mother's farm,
Andalusia. That had to be incredibly difficult.
You know, she tasted that freedom in Iowa and
New York. She was corresponding with the literary
elite. And suddenly she's back in her childhood
home, completely dependent on her mother for
her daily care. It was a massive, massive constraint.
But in a way that is so typical of her, she turned
that prison into her workspace. She established
this incredibly rigid routine. She'd go to mass
in the morning. Then she would write for three
hours, nine to noon, every single day, no exceptions.
And then she'd spend the entire afternoon and
evening just recuperating, reading, and dealing
with her illness. And the treatment for lupus
back then was brutal in itself. It was. The main
treatment was cortisone, these early high dose
steroids. And the side effects were just awful.
They caused her face to swell up, which is why
she looks so different in later photographs.
Her hair thinned and worst of all, they weakened
her bones. Her hip bones eventually just disintegrated
and she spent the last decade of her life on
crutches. So she was living with constant pain.
constant pain and yet look at what she produced
in that state she wrote the bulk of her work
over two dozen short stories and her second novel
while on these debilitating drugs it completely
changes how you read her descriptions of the
human body in her stories when she writes about
bodies that are failing or grotesque or that
don't do what the mind wants them to do she's
not just making it up she's writing from direct
personal experience when your own body is literally
attacking itself the idea of the grotesque isn't
some abstract literary device. It's your morning
reality. And somehow, in the middle of all this
pain and all this writing, there were the birds.
We started with the backward walking chicken,
but at Andalusia, her obsession with birds just
exploded. It became her trademark. She started
raising peafowl. peacocks and peahens. At one
point she had around a hundred of them roaming
the farm. A hundred peacocks? I can't even imagine
the noise. They are not quiet birds. They have
the scream that famously sounds like a woman
being murdered, but she loved them. And she had
other birds too. Ducks, geese, even ostriches
and emus for a time. But the peacocks were special.
She wrote a whole essay about them, The King
of the Birds. She did. And for her, the peacock
was this perfect living symbol of what she was
trying to write about. It represented divine
beauty and mystery. It makes sense when you think
about it. I mean, a peacock is kind of a clumsy,
awkward -looking bird with those weird feet and
that scrawny neck. It's a bit grotesque. All
right, until it opens its tail. And then it's
just this overwhelming, unbelievable, iridescent
explosion of beauty. Exactly. It's grace made
visible. It's beautiful, but it's also strange.
And she loved the eyes on the feathers. She connected
them to the all -seeing eyes of the church. It
was a constant living reminder of her core themes.
And it wasn't a lead -in -life hobby either.
There's that great anecdote from her high school
years. Oh, the duck. It's fantastic. Before the
peacocks, when she was a teenager, she had a
pet duck. And she sewed a complete... outfit
for it like a little jacket a full outfit underwear
and clothes she sewed a whole wardrobe for this
duck and then took it to school to model it for
her home economics class that's just wonderful
it shows that even then She had this instinct
for the surreal, for performance. It does. And
it's a good reminder that she wasn't just this
grim, suffering saint. She had this playful,
strange sense of humor. But we absolutely should
not mistake her physical isolation on the farm
for intellectual isolation. No, she was anything
but a hermit in that sense. She was a voracious
reader. And she was a professional critic. She
wrote over 100 book reviews for various Catholic
newspapers and diocesan bulletins. And she wasn't
reviewing, you know, light inspiration. No way.
She was reviewing serious... difficult theologians
and philosophers, people like Simone Weil, Romano
Gardini, the Christian existentialist Gabriel
Marcel. She was deeply, deeply engaged with the
most complex theological and philosophical currents
of her time. And she didn't just stay on the
farm. Not at all. Despite being on crutches,
despite her frail health, she traveled all over
the country to give lectures. She made over 60
public appearances at colleges and writing conferences.
She was determined to be a part of the literary
conversation. Which brings us to a part of the
conversation about her that is much more difficult.
It's something we have to talk about if we're
going to be honest about her legacy. We have
to talk about the Mrs. Turpin letters and the
controversy over her views on race. Yeah, this
is it's a critical part of understanding O 'Connor
in the 21st century. For a long time, the public
image of her was that for a white woman in Georgia
in the 1950s and 60s, she was relatively progressive.
Right. The record shows she voted for John F.
Kennedy in 1960. She privately expressed support
for Martin Luther King Jr. and the goals of the
civil rights movement. And her stories, as we've
said, often brutally satirize racists. But then,
then you read her private letters. And a very...
different and much more troubling picture emerges.
A much more complicated one. Yes. She had this
long correspondence with the playwright Mariette
Lee. And in those letters, O 'Connor sometimes
adopted the persona of Mrs. Turpin, a character
from her story revelation who is this incredibly
prejudiced, self -satisfied, judgmental woman.
And the things she wrote as Mrs. Turpin, or just
as herself, they can be really jarring to read
today. They can. There's one quote in particular
that is... cited all the time. She wrote to Marriott
Lee, you know, I'm an integrationist by principle
and a segregationist by taste. I don't like Negroes.
They all give me a pain. And the more of them
I see, the less and less I like them, particularly
the new kind. Integrationist by principle and
a segregationist by taste. That phrase just captures
such a deep, uncomfortable conflict. It's like
she's admitting that her intellect, her moral
compass, knows that integration is right. But
her gut reaction, her cultural conditioning,
is pulling her in the opposite racist direction.
Exactly. And she doesn't try to pretty it up.
She just states it with that same blunt, unsparing
honesty she applies to everything else. And it
creates this massive paradox for us as readers.
Her biographer, Brad Gooch, he points out that
in other letters, she's fiercely defending a
black friend she made back in Iowa to her own
mother, who was more traditionally racist. So
in one context, she's defending a cross -racial
friendship. And in another, she's writing these
frankly ugly racist comments. Which is why Gooch
says, you know, it's complicated. I don't think
that we can box her in. She resists easy categorization.
But that complexity has had real world consequences.
In 2020, Loyola University in Maryland made the
decision to rename a resident. residence hall
that had been named for her. They cited the racism
present in some of her work and specifically
these private letters. It forces us into that
really difficult debate about separating the
art from the artist, especially when the artist's
work is so focused on dissecting the very moral
flaws like racism that she herself seems to have
privately held. I mean, everything that rises
must converge is one of the most brilliant critiques
of white liberal condescension and old Southern
racism. ever written and yet the person who wrote
it held some of those same views it's a tension
that just doesn't resolve we want our artistic
heroes to be morally pure and flannery o 'connor
just wasn't she was as flawed and contradictory
as one of her own characters and so much what
we know about her inner life comes from those
letters The main collection, The Habit of Being,
edited by Sally Fitzgerald, is considered a literary
work in its own right. Oh, absolutely. Some people
argue her letters are her greatest work. She
corresponded with major poets like Robert Lowell
and Elizabeth Bishop. But for years, one of her
most important correspondence was a complete
mystery. In the book, she's just referred to
as A. Yeah, it sounds so mysterious. It was for
a long time. It turned out A was a woman named
Betty Hester, a file clerk from Atlanta. She
just wrote O 'Connor a fan letter one day, a
very intelligent one, and it sparked this incredibly
deep, years -long correspondence about faith,
literature, despair, everything. And her identity
was kept secret. At her own request. Betty Hester
gave the letters to Sally Fitzgerald for the
book on the condition that she remain anonymous.
Her identity was only finally revealed after
her death when the full unsealed collection was
opened at Emmer University in 2007. It just goes
to show how O 'Connor could forge these profound
intellectual and spiritual connections through
writing because her physical world was so small.
Her letters were her lifeline. They were. And
what's amazing is that we're still discovering
things about her. Here we are in the 2020s and
new material. is still surfacing. Let's talk
about some of that recent stuff. In 2024, a new
O 'Connor book was published, Why Do the Heathen
Rage? Which is just incredible to think about.
This was her unfinished third novel, the book
she was working on when she died. A scholar named
Jessica Hooten Wilson took the fragments, the
drafts, the notes, and assembled them into a
coherent volume. So it gives us a glimpse of
where she was headed creatively. It does. It
draws on characters and themes from stories like
the enduring chill and why do the heathen rage.
It seems like she might have been trying to move
in a slightly different direction, maybe away
from the pure grotesque and towards something
else. But we'll never really know for sure. And
then there's the art. We talked about her college
cartoons, but in 2023, there was a major discovery
in the attic of her childhood home in Savannah.
A treasure trove. They found two large barrels
just filled with paintings she had done on wood
tiles. And they had been hidden. They'd been
hidden away for decades. The story is that the
trustees of her estate were worried that if people
knew she was also a painter, it might somehow
distract from her legacy as a serious writer.
That's a strange kind of logic. It is. But now
they've been recovered and they're slated to
be exhibited in 2025. It just adds another whole
layer to her creativity. She was always making
things, whether with words or with a paintbrush.
And popular culture is still wrestling with her,
too. There was the 2023 film Wildcat. Right.
Directed by Ethan Hawke, starring his daughter
Maya Hawke as Flannery. It focuses on her early
years and her struggle to get Wise Blood published.
But we should probably add a little academic
disclaimer here. We should. A number of O 'Connor
scholars have taken issue with the film's historical
accuracy. One scholar, Bruce Gentry, went so
far as to claim it contains 500 factual errors.
500. So it's probably best to view it as a fictionalized,
impressionistic take on her life, not a documentary.
It's a movie. It needs a movie's narrative arc,
which doesn't always line up with the messy reality
of a person's life. That's good advice. So we
have all these new discoveries, the art, the
unfinished book, the film. But ultimately, her
story ends where it began, in a way, with the
disease that had shadowed her. since she was
a teenager. It does. In the summer of 1964, she
had to have surgery for a fibroid tumor. The
stress of the surgery caused her lupus, which
had been in a kind of remission, to flare up
with a vengeance. And she knew what was happening.
Oh, she knew. She wrote a letter to a friend,
a nun named Sister Mariella Gable, and she used
this absolutely chilling phrase. She said, The
wolf, I'm afraid, is inside tearing up the place.
The wolf is inside. And lupus, the word itself,
is Latin for wolf. She knew exactly what she
was writing. It was the end. She died on August
3rd, 1964. She was only 39 years old. 39. It's
just so young. But the body of work she left
is so dense, so heavy. So as we wrap up this
deep dive, let's try to synthesize it. What's
the big takeaway from Flannery O 'Connor? And
that, I think, is the so what. for us today why
does she still matter so much we live in a world
that is so incredibly curated our social media
lives are all about presenting a filtered sentimental
pretty version of reality. Exactly. And Flannery
O 'Connor is the ultimate antidote to that. She
offers what you might call an unsentimental acceptance
of imperfection. She demands that you, the reader,
look at the grotesque reality of things, your
own flaws, your own mortality, your own capacity
for ugliness, and find grace there in the mess,
not in some cleaned up, filtered fantasy. It's
a real corrective. It makes me think of that
little controversy over the postage stamp. Oh,
that is the perfect final example. In 2015, the
U .S. Postal Service issued a stamp to honor
her, and the portrait they used was nice. It
was too nice. That's what the critics said. They
argued it was a complete betrayal of who she
was. It was the soft, focused portrait of her
with some pretty decorative peacock feathers
in the background that made her look pleasant,
like a kindly, gentle librarian who likes birds.
And pleasant is the last word anyone would use
to describe Flannery O 'Connor or her work. Not
even close. This was a woman who wore these sharp,
aggressive cat -eye glasses, whose face was scarred
and swollen from her medication. She wrote, in
her own words, to shock a morally blind world.
And by smoothing out her image on that stamp,
by making her palatable and pretty, the USPS
was doing exactly what she accused the northern
reader of doing. They were trying to make the
grotesque acceptable. Trying to make it comfortable.
And her entire project was about making us uncomfortable
for the good of us. of our own souls so the question
she leaves us with is are we willing to look
at the world and at ourselves as it actually
is backward walking chickens violent grace and
all or do we just want the soft focus postage
stamp version it's a question I think she would
be very pleased we're still asking well on that
provocative thought I think that's where we'll
end our deep dive for today thanks so much for
listening thank you