And thus was Mary Flannery O'Connor described by some cheeky bastard whose name I can no longer recall. I have just finished reading Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch (2009), and turning the last page, I feel I have lost a friend. Reading a detailed account of her life, and her death from Lupus at the age of 38, and visiting her home, Andalusia, at Milledgeville, Georgia several weeks ago has immersed me in her world. Every night for the past week, I have ended my day with her. Living here in Georgia as I do, the towns and places she speaks and writes of are intimately familiar to me; Atlanta, Savannah, Milledgeville. Through her I have come to know places, and the culture and mores of the American South, at a deeper level. But more than that, she's been good company and a friend in the way that good writers and good books are: in their words you find yourself, a better self, a deeper self. And with them at your side, you feel less alone.
My relationships with books have been some of the most real of my life. If you are a reader you will know what I mean by this. I cannot remember a time in my life when I could not read. I know I was reading and writing in kindergarten, and my teacher angered my mother by telling her she had "ruined" me, because I was supposed to learn these things in school, not already know them when I got there. In spite of this, my kindergarten teacher wanted to fail me and make me repeat the year, because apparently I was so quiet that she thought I was socially awkward and needed another year to adjust to the other children. If she had bothered to ask me, I would have told her that I didn't find I had much in common with the other children because they could not read yet, so I preferred to spend my time painting rather than talking. But she did not ask.
At home, my circle of friends was large, spanning the globe and the centuries. My grandfather and I read the National Geographic together, my grandmother and I read together every afternoon during the month of June, which I always spent with them at their home near what is now the Oregon Dunes National Seashore. The only child in a family of very modest means, I was spoiled in two ways: my parents and grandparents spent time with me teaching me skills and telling me stories, and while I was not allowed to ask for things, I was allowed to choose any book I wanted from a bookstore. This thrilled me to the very marrow, prompting spontaneous pirouettes of glee, and very early I developed lists of books to read, books to purchase, books to borrow, books already read, books I loved, books to give as gifts, books to read again, books that really should be written, and books that I would write. My hall table now holds books borrowed from Nell, books to give to Nell, notes on books as heard on NPR that sound worthwhile, books to finish because I started them, books to tuck away discreetly before the in-laws visit the next time, books I'm flirting with but haven't made up my mind about reading yet and really should make a decision about before next Thursday night, when Nell comes over for a glass of wine, and declares, "Oh GOD! Look at this! We're such book-sluts!"
Long, luxurious afternoons inhaling books and the smell of hot boxwood. Days spent with chicken pox eating caramels and reading all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books in quick succession. Pneumonia and Margaret Mitchell. David Copperfield in one fevered night. Picking up Paul Reiser and David Sedaris in public places and reading entire books standing up, laughing so hard strangers look at me with a mixture of pity and envy. The month I read War and Peace, and then almost everything else Tolstoy wrote, and fell in so in love with being in the middle of that wonderful book I walked around bereft for a week when I finished it because I didn't know where my bookmark lived. Baths that have started out hot and turned cold without me noticing. Sunny fall afternoons reading Nathaniel Hawthorne on the front steps, with a cup of Red Rose tea, as Hawthorne should always be read. May Sarton's diaries every spring, Plant Dreaming Deep, entering deeply into one writer's life, and by doing so, entering more deeply into my own.
The act of writing is the act of taking your skin off, and the act of reading is the act of temporarily wearing another's skin. To see their world through their eyes, to share in and value their experiences. Thomas Merton's epitaph of O'Connor, on the back of Everything That Rises Must Converge read "I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor." (Gooch, pg. 372). Thank you Flannery, and from one plain gal to another, you did tell a damn good story.
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