Flannery presents lively biography of Milledgeville’s bird of pray

Flannery O’Connor’s life never went to the extremes of her work. How could it?

In her unique, off-putting novels and short stories, O’Connor crossbred humor, horror and piety; her output had such hybrid vigor that she virtually established the genre of the Southern grotesque. Her first novel, Wise Blood, critiques Southern religion by way of homicide, self-mutilation, mummies and gorilla suits. Her famous, oft-anthologized short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” begins with a mundane family road trip and ends with psycho killer, as if A Trip to Bountiful received a surprise visit from No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.

As Milledgeville, Ga.’s most famous resident for the majority of her brief life, O’Connor wrote unnerving tales that probably kept the town’s name synonymous with “mental instability” almost as much as the notorious Milledgeville Lunatic Asylum. Yet O’Connor lived the life of a genteel spinster, devout Catholic and famed bird-fancier, having contracted lupus, a disease that claimed her father, narrowed her personal horizons and took her life in 1964 at the age of 39. O’Connor told a friend in a letter, “There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”

Brad Gooch uses that quote as the epigram for Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, the first biography of one of the South’s most iconic literary figures. “After spending five years with Flannery O’Connor, I see it more as a coy challenge than a statement of fact,” Gooch says of the remark. “Certain editors and people, including O’Connor’s friend Elizabeth Hardwick, asked me ‘Do you think there’s a life there?’ She was perceived as the Emily Dickinson of Milledgeville.”