Too Brief a Life

Flannery O'Connor

I got acquainted with Flannery O'Connor's fiction when I was in college. I thought her characters were a bit freakish and didn't understand her deeper meaning. I recently picked up her new biography by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell and gained a whole new appreciation of her. She is acclaimed as one of the foremost Catholic writers of the 20th century, and although she was only 39 when she died of lupus, she left a hefty body of work, including A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Wise Blood. Confined to her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, for much of her life, she wrote several hours every day in spite of her debilitating illness. Her strong Catholic faith was embedded in her fiction, but it was never overt or saccarine. In fact, some Catholics were scandalized by her stories. She had a quirky sense of humor and matter of fact way of speaking that endeared her to many. In addition to her stories, she gave lectures on writing at colleges, wrote book reviews for Catholic newspapers and wrote hundreds of letters to friends and fans. I love this quote from one of her letters: "What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross." She truly experienced the cross in her life, but she never let it interfere with her rich prayer life or her writiing. I wonder what she would have accomplished if she had lived longer.

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