A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor: Thoughts and Reflections
The first short story I ever read written by Flannery O'Connor was " Good Country People ." I think I read and re-read it five times that first sitting. It was so thoroughly Southern and shocking--so full of religious imagery and violence. I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow it was a story about me--even though such a thing was impossible. " A Good Man Is Hard to Find " soon followed, and I was confronted with O'Connor's uncanny ability to take a thoroughly irredeemable character and then somehow redeem her through suffering, shame and degradation. As I read, I found myself in turns glad that Joy/Hulga was getting her comeuppance, then full of pity afterward. There was something about the way O'Connor wrote that resonated with my often self-loathed Southernness, and made me almost proud of it in ways I could not fully describe. Proud in the way that one might show a scar from a particularly nasty accident that almost t...