A review by ill_be_your_huckleberry
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Sally Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Fitzgerald

3.0

This is mixture of essays and typescripts for lectures produced in the 1960s. Flannery O'Connor has always been an enigma to me, and these writings give depth to lot of her literary idiosyncrasies. In particular, the grotesque and peculiar traits of many of her characters. O'Connor has an enormous fascination with the poor but not in an exploitative sense. The mystery of survival brings out those supreme personalities, and writers should take heed, instead of using plot to characterize. O'Connor explains this in detail for a workshop lecture: "In most good stories it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. In most of these stories, I feel that the writer has thought of some action and then scrounged up a character to perform it. If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don't have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if you don't know what before you begin."