Brad Gooch recently spoke with CNN about Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, his exhaustively researched exploration of O’Connor’s unlikely journey from shy, sarcastic and “contrary” Georgia girl to acerbic literary treasure. CNN notes that “Gooch uncovers much that even ardent followers of the author will find revealing, including details of her college career as a cartoonist, and her time in Iowa City at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”

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.

Edmund White calls Gooch the “ideal biographer” for O’Connor. You can join him for a talk about her on April 18, as part of our Books & Bagels series.

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