Flannery
A new biography on Flannery O’Connor, called Flannery, by Brad (not Bradley) Gooch, was reviewed this week in the New York Times (“Stranger than Paradise” by Joy Williams). The review functions as a list: maybe it gives away all the good details of the biography, I’m not sure. As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens. / She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. Andalusia is the name of her home. My home doesn’t have a name. I like the word Andalusia.
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Do we love to think that writers are crazy? Flannery O’Connor’s stories were one of my first literary loves. I took out books from the library on Catholic Southern writers to understand why I seemed to love them so much. The world doesn’t make sense in her stories, and people are cruel, and it is so beautiful, and the sun is always sweltering. I think I will read this new biography, though once I read a biography of Anne Sexton and it actually made me a little bit unstable for almost a week. I love biographies. Maybe by the time I am dead I will finally understand that every family is its own microcosm of insanity.
