A review by radioactve_piano
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor

3.0

I love Flannery O'Connor's fiction, so when I discovered I still hadn't read this book six years after I bought it for a class as "supplementary material", I got excited.

Turns out I should have only been partly excited. O'Connor is predictably opinionated about all the topics within this book. For the most part, that wasn't a problem for me. I like her no-false-modesty stance on why she wrote ("because I'm good at it"); I like her annoyance at the idea that writing can be taught ("if it's not natural, coming from some place you tap into but have no control over, then it's not worth reading"); hell, I even liked her strong ideas about the difference between a "Southerner" and anyone else.

I just could not stand the religious parts. At all. It was as if she forgot all of her "rules" for others when religion came up; every essay or speech that touched on this topic was pretty much full of the stereotypical Catholic rhetoric that makes non-Catholics want to spit.