You Shall Know O'Connor, and She Will Make You Odd

What I say when someone says, "I just don't get Flannery O'Connor."

Let’s just say it: Flannery O’Connor is hard for many people to understand. I have heard from many people who have been told what a great writer she is and who have tried to read her only to be completely mystified by her stories. Here is my response to those who are looking for something to give them some kind of orientation on O’Connor. These resources won’t completely resolve anyone’s problem with understanding O’Connor: Ultimately, that will require simply reading her over and over again. What O’Connor says about how to understand a story is also true, for the rest of us, of understanding O’Connor herself:

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

But there are a few resources that will help in the process of understanding O’Connor.

The book Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-haunted South by Ralph Wood is excellent in that regard. Also, I would highly recommend watching the episode of PBS’s American Masters on O’Connor. It is excellent and instructive. I also recommend reading at least some of her correspondence in The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters. It will help a person “get” O’Connor. Her biography is also included in the book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (taken from the title of one of her short stories), by Paul Elie. Hers is one of the four biographies in the book, which also covers the lives of Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy.