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

4.0

I picked this up because I wanted more of Flannery O'Connor's snarky attitude in my life. Before reading this, I was only familiar with some of her interviews about the grotesque and being a Catholic writer in the South. You get a lot of that in here, to the point that it does get a little repetitive. I found myself getting bored when some of the essays returned to the same arguments about these topics. I also wasn't a fan of her disapproving stance towards modern literature and English teachers, though I was a little amused by it. However, I think her essay on the Southern Writer and the Grotesque and her essay on Writing Short Stories made the experience worth it. I'm probably partial to those because I usually teach "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and both of those essays address that story. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the last piece in the volume, an introduction for a memoir of a child who died young in a Catholic children's hospital. I loved the connection O'Connor traced between Nathaniel Hawthorne's encounter with a disfigured child in a hospital ward and his daughter's life's work, which established the hospital that cared for the young girl. But, to be honest, I knew I would like O'Connor's intro when it began "Stories of pious children tend to be false." That's my kind of snark.