CNN's Matthew Carey interviewed Brad Gooch whose new biography of Flannery O'Connor is Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. This is the first major biography of the National Book Award-winning author since her death from lupus in 1964. Gooch found her to be a fascinating and complex character and wanted to discover how such a chaste, religious woman could write stories that are so acerbically funny and so shockingly violent.
CNN: What did you find most remarkable about her?
Gooch: I think the discipline of her writing becomes ... almost inspiring. She developed lupus when she was 25, she lived until she was 39. And in that period, she kept up this regimen that she had begun at the Iowa Writers' Workshop of writing every morning for three hours, even if it meant sitting in front of a blank page. ...
[Near the end of her life] she was editing her final stories and hiding them under the pillow in the hospital from the doctors so that she could go on. She was still working on her last story after she had last rites. ... All of that is a sort of [a] level of commitment that is startling and unmatched.
CNN: Her stories are often funny, yet disturbing.
Gooch: Her style goes under these names, like grotesque or gothic, but she was really crossing these two wires of humor and almost this kind of dark theological writing that had never been put together before. ...
[In "A Good Man is Hard to Find"] a family on vacation ... meets someone named the Misfit, this ex-con in the woods. ... And he winds up shooting the entire family while spouting existentialist, nihilist philosophy.
And in that story, there's always a point where you keep laughing past this line, and suddenly someone's being shot and you're laughing and then [readers] get very uncomfortable. They can't tell whether this is supposed to be funny or not, and I think that O'Connor definitely works in that territory, where you can't tell if she's being funny or tragic and serious.
Brad Gooch is a professor of english at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor is available at bookstores everywhere and for a discount at Amazon.com. Brad recommends five of his favorite books in an article at The Daily Beast.
