The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

is like the impact of violence," Flannery O'Connor once wrote, which doesn't explain her stories but does help illuminate them. Having read her short stories and seen the cult film of Wise Blood, I nevertheless approached her letters gingerly. However, they hail from a time and tradition when letter writing was not only an art but a means of expression and communication. She works out a lot of the ideas she's writing about in her letters, which makes reading the finished works that much more fascinating. O'Connor raised peacocks and lived on a farm in Georgia, but she also had lupus, an incurable disease. She's not sentimental about it (or about most things); she'd be a candidate for a Catholic realist (if there is such a category). Almost any writer or reader will find these letters fascinating for what they reveal about O'Connor and her method of working. Almost any spiritually-minded reader will find them equally intriguing for her insights on the human condition. Because Protestants don't have sacraments (Catholics have seven sacraments, Protestants have two), she once suggested, they have to make everything up as they go along. That seems to me to be the case in some post-modern churches where, it would seem, anything goes. But it would be incorrect, as Ralph Wood shows in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-haunted South, to think she therefore held the fundamentalists who people her books in disdain, as did liberal Protestants and much of society in her time. Her generous nature is one reason so many are returning to reading O'Connor, and so many new readers are discovering her.

Flannery O'Connor's correspondence is a fine testimony to humor, faith, and work in the life of a fascinating and absolutely unswerving human being. As she says in a letter to Andrew Lytle from this collection, the fact that she was a Catholic kept her from being a regional writer and the fact that she was a Southerner kept her from being a Catholic writer. If you want the best tutorial you're apt to ever read on how to write fiction, forget the usual "Write a Novel in 30 Days" garbage and get a copy of THE HABIT OF BEING. She'll also teach you quite a bit about living.

Flannery wrote under a death sentence, and it seems inescapable that she expected - or at least hoped and imagined - that these letters would be published. Thus, they are written to you, dear reader, as much as to anyone. And they are superb. This is Flannery at her best. If you, like so many, are enthralled by her works, you will find this book essential. If you suspect that some of the self-appointed and so-called experts on her work could benefit from a strong laxative and are curious to find out what she herself really had in mind in her various stories, you will find this book immensely rewarding. And if you imagine that you might enjoy the musings of a soul whose wisdom, character, and intellect were each exceptional, you will find this book compelling.

Flannery is a beautiful person; reading these letters you feel like you are conversing with a personal friend and hope you get the chance to meet her; you can't help but wish you could have had the chance to correspond with her.After years of loving her fiction, I found that, in these letters, her fiction and her soul unveil their beauty --- just like her beloved peafowl.

THE HABIT OF BEING is required reading for any Flannery O'Connor fan. Nobody can explain Flannery like Flannery. Through her letters the reader has an immediate connection to the writer and the woman, and that connection made me regret even more that I did not know her personally. Sally Fitzgerald includes letters that show Flannery's human side, her cranky side, her funny side, even her arrogant side. I read the letters before the identity of A was revealed, and I was intrigued. I went back and read them again after that identify was made public, and I'm even more intrigued. To understand fully what Flannery was attempting in her stories, one needs to read the letters. To understand fully what she was attempting in her life, one needs to read the letters. No satisfactory biography has been written about Flannery O'Connor, but I'm not sure that one is necessary when we have at least a start at an autobiography with THE HABIT OF BEING.