Any fans of Flannery O’Connor’s fixtion?

*fiction

From when I was12, her work had a big influence in my taste for literature and interest in the South.

I’ve only read her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” but it was a shocking read, and it still haunts me.

I've read and reread O'Connor. Southern gothic layered with Catholic guilt and an unwillingness to gloss over uncomfortable spiritual truths and eccentric/destructive human behaviors.

The Gooch bio was okay. I think a bio that covered her life and how certain of its aspects influenced her fiction would be dynamite to read. Maybe such a bio is out there, and I just haven't discovered it yet?

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

I am a big fan. Loved reading her lifetime of letters in 'Habit of Being', she was funny as Hell. One of my fave short stories is the "Temple of the Holy Ghost". Anyone who writes lines like “Enoch viewed this as an opportunity to insult a successful ape,” from "Enoch and the Gorilla" is pretty amazing.

I was into her stories during Trump and the pandemic; something in me wanted to commune with the darkness. I also got into Shirley Jackson during that time. When I was very young, I couldn't bear to read Flannery O'Connor (too sensitive), but in those latter days, I actually laughed at the conclusion of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." It was just SO over-the-top dark with the grandmother's stupidity leading them all to ... [spoiler avoided]. And her blathering was hilariously wrong.

I axed my librarian about Flannery O'Connor's fixtion!

Eudora Welty was the good witch, and Flannery O'Connor the wicked witch. Carson McCullers was the scarecrow with no brain, and Edna Ferber the tin woman with no heart.

Nelle Lee being Dorothy in your hypothetical….

And even the Southern literati knew that Margaret Mitchell was a no-account cunt.

Edna Buchanan doesn't like anyone thinking she's a southern author, I'll bet

Was she as big of a no talented cunt as her sister, Susan Flannery?

R6, I know what you mean. And I always laugh at “Hood Country People” when the guy steals the girl’s artificial leg after acting like he’s going to seduce bed and strands her in the barn loft. It’s just so fucked up.

Love the short story when the old racist Southern man lives in NYC with his daughter and keeps making racist comments to the black neighbor who finally shoves his head between the rails on a banister in their apartment building and kills him. O’Connor was not a saint when it came to her views on black people but Alice Walker did commend her black characters for being written with “no melons” and no “superior racial patience.”

The grandma on the car trip that story pops into my head every so often usually late at night when I am all alone.

*

I thought the Brad Gooch biography was well done and seemed like a thorough picture of O'Connor's too-short life. He also did a good job with his book on Frank O'Hara. And agree, Brad has kept up with the hotness.

R13, that's it exactly; "It's just so fucked up" -- so shockingly fucked up that you have to laugh.

I love "There's a serial killer on the loose" ... and three scenes later, "I know who you are." LOL. Good plan, Grandma!

Honestly, in that story, she does such a good job of delineating the character's vague and oblivious sense of superiority (in spite of her being kind of dumb) without ever pointing it out overtly.

Waaaay back in high school, we were assigned to read O’Connor in AP English. I was intrigued and read a few others. Since then though, nada.

I was bemused to see her title “The Artificial Nigger” included in the opening minutes of the movie “American Fiction”. I always remembered her work as being grotesque and uncomfortable, as opposed to so southern and neo-racist.

I just read AGMIHTF because everyone is talking about it here. It was fine I guess.....but a bit.....*slight*. I haven't read anything else by her but it's always seemed to me like she was overhyped- it's trendy to say you read her. Maybe I just need to read more. Based on this story (which she wrote when she was 30) I imagine that by the time she was 40 or 50 (had she continued to write) she could have been really good. The prose is lean and mean and the characters vibrant. But the storytelling needs some work. Shame she was sick and died so young.

Anybody else ever picture the Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as kinda hot?

I I also wondered by O’Connor say he wasn’t wearing a shirt meant he was bare chested or in a t-shirt. Small thing to wonder about but I still wondered.

R20, the first time I read it, I had no idea the story would go the way it did. I was stunned and then kind of laughed at that ending.

Note how no family member in the story has a proper name so they could easily just be archetypes rather than characters you’d really feel for.

r21, you read ONE story and declare her "slight"?? Good god, to reduce one of American fiction's true geniuses to the condescending description of "overhyped" and her readers trend-seekers? ONE story? Jesus wept.

Brad Gooch hasn't gone away. He just published a well-regarded bio of Keith Haring.

My favorite story of hers is “Revelation,” which end with the main character’s vision of herself and people like her on their way to heaven, but with “everything, even their virtues, burned away.”

Everything that rises must converge.

And then you rub the dicks together.

At least outside Flannery County.

"Everything That Rises Must Converge" is such a great story. It has one of the most unsettling endings of all time.

'You aren't who you think you are."

The movie “Wildcat,” which. I just saw this afternoon, does little adaptations of both “Revelation” and “Everything That Rises” and they both are failures. They have none of the power of the stories. The waiting room attack in “Revelation” is too subdued and she doesn’t even have the bad acne. And the “Rises” segment suffers from cutting out too much of the mother/son( or in this case, Maya Hawke dressed in a man’s suit) repartee.

The movie will not have people searching out “The Collected Stories.”

R23, I think R20 simply meant that he found AGMIHTF slight--just the story, not FC's entire oeuvre.

I happen to agree she's a bit overrated. I admire Shirley Jackson's work much more.

"The River" is one of my favorite short stories. I used to dream about that ending.

Shirley Jackson wrote some good stories and some fantastic novels but her stories don’t resonate and stay in my mind like O’Connor’s do.

Conversely, O’Connor’s two novels don’t match Jackson’s.

There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. “Does it seem right to you, sir, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?” “Jesus!” the old man cried. “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a man! I know you come from nice! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a man. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!” “Sir,” The Misfit said, looking beyond him far into the woods, “there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.” There were two more pistol reports and the grandfather raised his head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!” as if his heart would break.

This alteration allows us to observe how changing the gender of the character being addressed might affect the dynamic and emotional impact of the scene.

[R25] Loved "Revelation" and her description of the waiting room at the doctor and the "pig parlor"!! I once saw a "White Trash Quiz" that revealed that you are white trash if "you've never heard of Flannery O'Connor but she's heard of you!"

Wildcat filmed scenes in my neighborhood in Louisville in January of last year. It's all houses from the late 19th/early 20th century.

They cleared a couple of streets and parked period appropriate cars. A set director contacted us and asked to rent our driveway over a weekend which we agreed to and it was used for craft services vans.

If it was the grandfather, and he did his grandpa shenanigans would that really justify him getting shot? Yeah everyone is better with a gun to their head. The grandma didn't do anything wrong, she was just a lonely lady busybody. No pack of criminals would waste time fucking around to shoot a random family that already looked half-dead on the highway. Even if they recognized them so what?

Replace the gender of the misfit with some hardened Eileen Wuornos woman criminal and some annoying grandpa and it doesn't pack the same punch AS THE LAYERS OF SUBTLE AND OVERT RACISM AND MISOGYNY BUILT INTO AUTHORS Born 100 years ago. So what if it's a tool to point out sanctimonious people?

It's good sort of but also not.

Just read the entire book of short stories. The story about the guy who romanced the woman with an artificial leg is scary. He takes her up to a loft then steals her prosthesis and leaves her up there ... without her leg.

"The Displaced Person" (short story) is memorable.

John Huston made a movie of "Wise Blood." I haven't seen it, yet, although it's an old movie.

If I had to choose one writer and say: I want to write like him / her, it would be Flannery O'Connor.

To think, if she had more of chin, she would have been normal and gone to Bobby Sox mixers and we wouldn't have all of these wonderful weird stories.

R35 Actually the misfit’s gender means nothing because he’s more than a serial killer. He’s a fatal car accident, a killer tornado, a deadly plague, the grim reaper itself. Nothing justifies what happens to the family; the point is that it did.

Amongst her output, I find 'The lame shall enter first' a bit different in atmosphere from the others and also one of my favorites. Someone once did a thesis on the children in Flannery O'Connor stories. I would love to get my hands on that.

Are there any film series for the short stories?

R38 at the end it was a little hard on the old lady in judging her, saying she was only good under the duress of a gun. She wasn't that good, she was trying to plead for her life. The Misfit gang was like a deliverer of justice or something but they were a thousand times worse. I don't understand the morality of the story. The children were funny. It was an interesting story just not sure about the bleakness of it all.

Interesting to see people in 1953 lament about the decline of society and things not being how they used to be.

I love Flannery O’Connor and had the pleasure of attending a Sally Fitzgerald lecture about O’Connor at Harvard.

Sally Fitzgerald was the editor of “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor.”

She was also co-editor with her then-husband, Robert, of “Flannery O’Connor: Mystery and Manners.”

Sadly no, R40. Not even when PBS had that American short story series in the 70s. (They did do a wonderful adaptation of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” with a perfectly cast Shelley Duvall.)

As mentioned above, the movie “Wildcat” does have snippets of some of O’Connor’s stories filmed but they’re very quick and unsatisfying. Just her novel “Wide Blood” was adapted as a film in 1979, directed by John Huston.

It would be great if there were more short story series in general. It's hard to really translate into film but that's the challenge and a worthy one.

R43 “Wise Blood” not “wide”

O'Connor was a nasty piece of work, a closeted lesbian who despised other gay people, particularly other gay writers.

Proof, please ^

O'Connor appears as a major character in Ann Napolitano's novel A GOOD HARD LOOK. It's a good book and a credible portrait of O'Connor.

I like Bernice Bobs her hair. I imagine O'Connor would have murdered Marjorie in the end.

Both times I read this headline I thought it said Flannery O'Connor's fixation.

[quote] I don't understand the morality of the story.

I don't think there is a protagonist in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Misfit (killer) is obviously a bad guy. But the descriptions of the hapless family members are not sympathetic either. They were eating, shitting, fucking, baby-making vessels. There was nothing good about any of the family members. It took a shocking, come-to-Jesus event for the grandmother to finally muster a shred of empathy and compassion.

[quote][R38] at the end it was a little hard on the old lady in judging her, saying she was only good under the duress of a gun. She wasn't that good, she was trying to plead for her life.

From a Christian perspective, O’Connor was alluding to the bargaining done by a sinner who suddenly repents when they face death.

[quote]But the descriptions of the hapless family members are not sympathetic either. They were eating, shitting, fucking, baby-making vessels. There was nothing good about any of the family members. It took a shocking, come-to-Jesus event for the grandmother to finally muster a shred of empathy and compassion.

Exactly.

Please she wasn't that bad. She chatted with the guy at the restaurant and told the unruly kids to behave. She was a human being. Sure, she didn't get on with her son but blaming women for being the way they were, making up stories for attention and such, when they had very little rights, couldn't do much without their husbands, it's not saying much. I guess she had to be less than saintly because no one would be on board with a perfect person being murdered. Even the baby screamed, how dare they. I suppose shock value and an engrossing story that doesn't follow much of any morality is what this is.

I laughed at the kids disappointed no one was killed after the accident. They sounded like DLers.

Who's blaming women, R53? Every member of that family was unsympathetic. If you want something with a clear protagonist and a clear antagonist, read Goofus and Gallant.

R53 On the contrary. the reason AGMIHTF was shocking is that the characters are relatable, especially if you’ve grown up in a dysfunctional family. The malicious gossip, petty arguments, and selfish, vile behavior are not unusual; it’s human nature. That’s not why the family was slaughtered. The Misfit would have still have slaughtered them if they were kind, moral, and upstanding people. The murder is not the point of the story.

** “still would have” - sorry for the typos

You can see the short story 'Displaced person" adapted in to a 55 mini movie. And with a very early screen credit for Samuel L Jacksons.

Flannery O’Connor wrote stories about the inbreaking of grace and what it takes for some people to allow for it to happen.

In O’Connor’s worldview, it often takes something grotesque to occur in order for someone to finally be receptive to the grace of God.

R57, good find!

Only Nathaniel West was darker.

A 2nd cousin of mine lived a couple blocks away from the O'Connors when Flannery was growing up in Savannah. She and my cousin went to the same school and were good friends until the O'Connors moved away to Milledgeville when Flannery was a teenager. My cousin used to tell me most of the kids were terrified of Flannery and they were so close because she wasn't afraid of her. My cousin said "she was all mouth and lots of action".

When Flannery became sick with Lupus for years my cousin would travel up to her Farm in Milledgeville every month to help care for her and keep her spirits up. And then she died, as we so eloquently say at DL.

[quote]The malicious gossip, petty arguments, and selfish, vile behavior are not unusual; it’s human nature.

… I forgot to add that this also explains the title of the story.

What else has FO'C written that is good?

R63, “Good Country People,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Revelation.”

That’s a great story, R61.

It is. What does "all mouth and lots of action" mean, though? I've never heard that turn of phrase.

I’ve never looked at peacocks the same way after reading Flannery O’Connor…

r63, she wrote fabulous, readable, fierce letters as mentioned above, collected as The Habit of Being.

[quote] What does "all mouth and lots of action" mean

I always assumed she was saying that Flannery was not shy with her words, and quite bold in her actions.

The Violent Bear It Away is one of the darkest novels ever written.

Anymore short stories that are good?

Have you read the ones that people have recommended? She died at age 39. She hadn't written *that* many stories.

As a child she watched her father suffer from lupus and die. Then she developed lupus. My brother died of lupus, it's a harsh disease.

Yes I read Good Country People, Might save your own life, the first one mentioned.

Any other short stories in general that are similarly engaging?

The problem with short stories is that you want them to continue.

Short story collections:

Try Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son."

Music for Chameleons, Truman Capote.

Sherman Alexie: Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

Thomas Mann's "Mario and the Magician."

I read Wise Blood and that was enough for me

R71, try ‘temple of holy ghost’ )and ‘lame shall enter first’ Temple has funny bits and that girl could be a baby Dler .. lame has an ending I was not expecting and could be considered more conventional and less gothic

Thanks. Looking for more good literature that's like crack.