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livingpalm1's review
5.0
The book is formed from Flannery's prolific letter writing over an almost twenty-year span until her painful death, lovingly curated by her author friend Sally Fitzgerald. The book (before the index) is 506 pages long. And I read every single one. It felt a bit like searching for clues to answer my question "Can I take this woman seriously when she says that she loves God and loves the Church and loves writing?"
Her take on the world is completely outside of my paradigm. If she were alive today and lived next door to me I think I'd avoid her for fear of her sharp insight into human behaviour, my behaviour to be specific. But letters, I could handle and letters seemed to be her favorite form of communication as well.
What surprised me most was the way she seems so often gentle, empathetic, even silly, in her letter writing voice. This felt quite different than her storytelling voice and rounded out my perspective on Flannery as a woman, daughter, mentor, and friend.
This is a book I've shamelessly marked up and will return to time and again. I hope that by the time I actually get to meet Flannery in person, I won't be so afraid of her. In the meantime, I'd like to be a little bit like her, the way she refused to take herself too seriously while at the same time observing fervently the truths of God and the human condition and writing them exactly the way she saw them. I'd like to make her a little bit proud, but I'm guessing she wouldn't admit it either way.
More of this review at my blog: http://www.tamarahillmurphy.com/blogthissacramentallife//2011/09/from-book-pile-2011-18-20.html?rq=habit%20of%20being
Her take on the world is completely outside of my paradigm. If she were alive today and lived next door to me I think I'd avoid her for fear of her sharp insight into human behaviour, my behaviour to be specific. But letters, I could handle and letters seemed to be her favorite form of communication as well.
What surprised me most was the way she seems so often gentle, empathetic, even silly, in her letter writing voice. This felt quite different than her storytelling voice and rounded out my perspective on Flannery as a woman, daughter, mentor, and friend.
This is a book I've shamelessly marked up and will return to time and again. I hope that by the time I actually get to meet Flannery in person, I won't be so afraid of her. In the meantime, I'd like to be a little bit like her, the way she refused to take herself too seriously while at the same time observing fervently the truths of God and the human condition and writing them exactly the way she saw them. I'd like to make her a little bit proud, but I'm guessing she wouldn't admit it either way.
More of this review at my blog: http://www.tamarahillmurphy.com/blogthissacramentallife//2011/09/from-book-pile-2011-18-20.html?rq=habit%20of%20being
jnepal's review
5.0
Love, love, love Mary Flannery O'Connor!
I hope to worship God in the New Jerusalem with her. I wish she hadn't had to go through suffering to get there, though. I wish none of us did. But Adam and Eve tripped on a snake with a lie in its fangs.
She was beautiful, though, really beautiful.
I love this quote about her faith, "Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy--fully armed too as it's a highly dangerous quest."
I love her funnyness, "At Emory they had a list of questions for me to answer and the first one was: Do you write from imagination or experience? My inclination at such a point is always to get deathly stupid and say, 'Ah jus writes.'"
"Her letters to me get less and less cordial and I get the idea that by now she is convinced I am a moron. I am convinced of it too so she ain't by herself."
She wrote by smell, "But I have no critical sense. I write entirely by smell as it were and criticize the same."
She loved Jesus, "The introduction is about the things that hold us fast in Christ when Christ is taken to be divine. It is worthless if it is not true."
Or how 'bout this quote on her difference of writing style with Graham Greene, "...there is a difference of fiction certainly and probably a difference of theological emphasis as well. If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it..."
I wish I could have met her.
Note: She does seem to have been (cliche) somewhat of a product of her time and place (as we all are to one degree or another)... she didn't seem to grasp, with her whole heart, the importance of reconciliation within and without the body of Christ as it has to do with peoples from different ethnicities/races (i.e. between white and black, specifically). It just feels like she hadn't been struck by the cross enough in this area of her heart as in other places of her heart. Nevertheless, she was definitely no lover of the klan or of those who treated others as less than human. She certainly seemed to agree that grace was the only thing that could bring true reconciliation, unfortunately (at least in these letters) she seems not to have been as concerned with it as she should have been (as we should be). Not that we have to be engaged in it full time, but that it needs to matter. I could be wrong though, about how she felt and what she believed in her heart.
I hope to worship God in the New Jerusalem with her. I wish she hadn't had to go through suffering to get there, though. I wish none of us did. But Adam and Eve tripped on a snake with a lie in its fangs.
She was beautiful, though, really beautiful.
I love this quote about her faith, "Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy--fully armed too as it's a highly dangerous quest."
I love her funnyness, "At Emory they had a list of questions for me to answer and the first one was: Do you write from imagination or experience? My inclination at such a point is always to get deathly stupid and say, 'Ah jus writes.'"
"Her letters to me get less and less cordial and I get the idea that by now she is convinced I am a moron. I am convinced of it too so she ain't by herself."
She wrote by smell, "But I have no critical sense. I write entirely by smell as it were and criticize the same."
She loved Jesus, "The introduction is about the things that hold us fast in Christ when Christ is taken to be divine. It is worthless if it is not true."
Or how 'bout this quote on her difference of writing style with Graham Greene, "...there is a difference of fiction certainly and probably a difference of theological emphasis as well. If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it..."
I wish I could have met her.
Note: She does seem to have been (cliche) somewhat of a product of her time and place (as we all are to one degree or another)... she didn't seem to grasp, with her whole heart, the importance of reconciliation within and without the body of Christ as it has to do with peoples from different ethnicities/races (i.e. between white and black, specifically). It just feels like she hadn't been struck by the cross enough in this area of her heart as in other places of her heart. Nevertheless, she was definitely no lover of the klan or of those who treated others as less than human. She certainly seemed to agree that grace was the only thing that could bring true reconciliation, unfortunately (at least in these letters) she seems not to have been as concerned with it as she should have been (as we should be). Not that we have to be engaged in it full time, but that it needs to matter. I could be wrong though, about how she felt and what she believed in her heart.
melanie_page's review
4.0
I'm going to DNF at 25%. O'Connor keeps writing to someone named "A," a stranger who wrote to O'Connor on after reading Wise Blood, and the two kept up correspondence for nine years. However, "A" wished to remain anonymous when she gave the editor her letters from O'Connor, so I'm struggling to figure out who exactly she is and why O'Connor is so enraptured with her. Mostly, O'Connor's letters to "A" are full of her thoughts on religion, but without "A"'s end of the conversation, I'm not sure what the letters are getting at. I did enjoy the letters before "A" came along, as they gave me a good sense of O'Connor's personality toward children, writing, and publishing.
emmastia's review
3.0
I didn't finish the whole book and I don't think I ever will, although I did enjoy what i have read. I am going to make an effort to read more of her stories.
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