writing | Grandma Flannery

So, the grandmother of this blog is none other than Flannery O'Connor, who begot one of my favorite short stories -- A Good Man is Hard to Find. After she birthed the story 54 years ago, I picked up the child, decided to write a 12 page paper on it, went a little crazy from sleep-deprivation, and then created my own idea baby, this blog.

(Sorry for the prolonged child analogy. I thought that would go somewhere.)

Anyways, there's a new biography out on her life and I spotted a woman on the subway reading a review of it in the New York Times; I thought it only right to mention it here.

And, it's not out of grandmotherly guilt that I make a Flannery shout out; the biography looks really good -- 30 bucks and 488 pages of really goodness. I'm pretty sure that it's interesting mostly because of its subject (the review of the biography reads more like a biography itself), but from what the reviewer reveals, Brad Gooch has poured over her life.

But I mean, look at her. An excerpt from the review and presumably from the book:

Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After ­Kennedy’s ­assassination she said: “I am sad about the president. But I like the new one.” As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a ­cartoonist.

<3

She's quirky, odd, downright weird, and all the same, lovable (in a morbid, prickly sort of way).

(I'm on this new posting kick -- let's see if we can keep this up.)