Me & Flannery O'Connor
she loves Jesus but sometimes she cusses, guys
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It’s long been my dream to write books.
As an author, I have the good fortune of visiting a lot of middle schools to teach writing workshops and give presentations on what it’s like to be an author. Almost every single visit, I’m asked the same smattering of questions, one of which is how long I’ve known I wanted to be an author. This is usually asked by a girl whose bangs are in her face, a girl who is curiously pretending not to listen that hard to the presentation while biting her nails and hanging on every word. She knows, you see. She knows that that little dream is on her heart, too, even though it feels preposterous and her friend has probably already told her that “normal people can’t just be authors”, as one fake-friend told me in eighth grade.
Every time, I look her in the eyes and tell her the truth: that I’ve always wanted to be an author. I tell her this because it’s true, and because I want to give her the permission she’s looking for. You want this? You can actually do this.
I’ve written two books for Catholic women, three middle grade novels (with two more coming out in the next two years1), and this year, my first novel for adults was published. The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County was a story I poured my heart and soul into—the story of four elderly best friends cooking meals for funerals, and what happens when a celebrity chef moves to town with his wayward son and precocious daughter. It’s so many things I love—canned soup and the Northwoods and loons singing and baby coyotes and community care. And the feedback has been incredible.
But I’m also experiencing something I’ve never experienced before: angry people in my inbox.
Don’t get me wrong. My inbox is no stranger to bad attitudes. I write about Catholic feminism. I am aware that phrase makes 85% of the population shudder for different reasons. I’m used to bad-faith accusations and reminders about Hell. I’m used to weaponized woundedness.
With my books, however, I’ve never experienced this. Bad reviews? Of course. But I don’t go looking for my book reviews2, and usually if people are emailing an author it’s raving about how much they loved a book, not—well. Getting really, really mad at them.
About swear words, and broken relationships, and people trying their best in really hard situations. All of which my book has.
I can’t believe you have the gall to call yourself a Christian, said one person. Typed one person. I mean, fair. I think that about myself sometimes. But it sure as hell isn’t because I say the f word.
My stories contain the gnarly parts of life: sin and swearing, mistakes and mayhem. They are not shelved in Christian fiction but that doesn’t mean they aren’t deeply Christian. The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County is about God. It has an entire scene that’s basically an homage to Brideshead Revisited to the point where I was a teensy bit nervous about being sued. But it isn’t about God in the way Veggie Tales is about God. Because God, to me, is not a sanitized cucumber singing weird songs but a real Being who is ever present with me in the midst of some very intense suffering and very glorious beauty. God has dirt under his fingernails and sweat on his cheeks and God does not run screaming for the hills from his very own people.
And this, dear reader, brings me to Flannery O’Connor.
Last January I had the good fortune of visiting Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home with my writing group. Flannery, if you’re unfamiliar, was a scrappy southern writer who loved the Gospel and loved a good story. Her stories were often dark, featuring intense sin and stunning redemption. Her faith bled out into everything she did.
The tour guide—who was absolutely phenomenal—showed us to Flannery’s nursery and pointed out the window. There, right by her old crib, you could see the spires of the Savannah cathedral. Flannery, the guide explained, grew up in the shadow of the Catholic Church. It was her home. And as an adult, she would get so frustrated when people didn’t realize what she was doing with her writing.
“She’d think, they aren’t getting it,” the tour guide passionately explained. “All of these readers, writing in about her stories and how much they loved them. They didn’t see. They didn’t understand that what she was writing about was grace.”
“I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.” - Flannery O’Connor
That same weekend, I had explained to my friends that I so often feel I have a foot in both worlds when really, my Catholicism is like that spire. It shadows everything I do. I live and breathe and go to Trader Joe’s and take my daughter potty and, yes, write novels as a Catholic. To try and explain the story of God’s grace—that is my life’s work.
It’s okay to not like swearing in your books3. It’s okay to not like any hint of romance in your books. It’s okay to not like guns in your books. I have my own line about content in books I don’t particularly enjoy. We’ll all have preferences and tastes, and we also have our own histories and sin struggles that make us sensitive or able to handle different types of content.
But the idea that a book is “disgusting” or “trash” because it contains humans sinning is an odd phenomenon.
Christians’ attempts to sanitize art, to wipe it clean of any smudge or dirt so that it passes some kind of purity test will be at our peril. I’m not (NOT, NOT, NOT) saying my little book is any great work of art. But let me remind you that Les Miserables is about a former convict raising the child of a prostitute. All The Light We Cannot See is partly told by a Nazi. To Kill a Mockingbird says the “n” word. The literal freaking *Bible* is rife with sexual violence. These stories, stories of immense grace and truth, contain sin because human beings sin. These stories are not real (aside from the Bible), but they are true.
Joy Clarkson recently said this in an Instagram post reviewing a recent Flannery biopic: “To me what matters more than the denomination of the author or the ‘message’ it conveys (as though works of literature and art were merely a vehicle for disembodied principles and rational ideas) is its quality, its capacity to get under the skin of things, to testify to and probe the depths of our common human experience. Does an author get down ‘under things’ and evoke that feeling of recognition, that ‘yes! That is how it is!’ Or even perhaps the aching ‘That is how things could be.’ For me, often the writers that do this best may not be straightforward believers— and yet the quality of their attention to the world illuminates its depths and helps us get, as Flannery puts it: ‘down under things where You are.’”
Is sin beautiful? No. But the redemption after sin is one of the most beautiful things there is. The reality of a human being contemplating their role in the great narrative of life? Beautiful. The story of a person making a mistake, living in the muck and grime of real life while still trying to hope for a better truth out there, is the definition of beauty.
And if we rid our shelves of this beauty because we’re so terrified of the realities of sin, what are we left with? Watered down twaddle that does nothing for our souls but simply paints a utopian picture of a world we don’t inhabit, leaving our spirits thirsting for the truth, beauty, and goodness good stories are capable of.
This, too: I was never going to fit in a niche. If my dream was to waltz through life easily fitting into a brand or even a creative space effortlessly, that dream was dashed long ago. I came into this world an outlandish little oddball and that’s the way I’ve stayed for 32 years. That suits me fine. The Christian life is not one of comfort, no matter how much we long for it to be so.
Yet it would be a bold-faced lie to say that I’m too holy to care4, and there’s something so comforting to me in knowing that I’m not alone. Flannery paved the way, writing rabble-rousing stories about freaks and misfits and bible peddlers, insisting that her stories were about grace and that God was ever present.
If you’re looking for a book with no swear words, I’m sorry, friend. My characters are northern Wisconsin Catholics who drink too much beer and have potty mouths. As someone else said in an email, “you can find cheaper trash for free online.”
I’ll be out here with Flannery. Or should I say, under here. Under things, where You are.
On My Nightstand
The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen: I’ve long loved Sarah Addison Allen’s lyrical prose and magical realism, so I’ve been working my way through her backlist the past couple of years. I’m loving this story of an unlikely friendship and a stately Southern mansion. Her books are so whimsical and cozy.
Shibboleth: This New Yorker piece on the Gaza protests on college campuses made a lot of headlines, because people either loved it or hated it. I’m very interested to hear what you think. “Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and ‘Jew’ and ‘colonialist’ are synonymous, and ‘Palestinian’ and ‘terrorist’ are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it.”
2023 Summer Swimsuit Guide for Christian Women: Just in time for summer. ;)
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Because I have a brain in my head
It is not okay, though, to EMAIL THE AUTHOR YOUR COMPLAINTS. Just a reminder. You can shout to the internet all day long about how much you hated a book; that comes with the territory. But emailing an author is a petty waste of time.
Feel free to continue praying for my humility! ;)
I love love LOVE Brideshead Revisited and my love for it has a lot to do with the fact that it's not a sanitised, pious type of holiness. It's messy, real, joyful, sorrowful, sinful, grace filled. I am running off now to find a copy of your new book asap!
I hope this isn’t something considered a complaint or accusatory - it's not meant to be any of that at all, but a perspective offered into this conversation after consideration of this topic (both as a reader and a writer, though I've never had anything published so I know it's not the same) over a number of years.
I completely agree with what you've said about needing real people and real situations for moving stories. I too was moved by Brideshead Revisited, and though I haven't read much Flannery O'Conner (mostly just because she hasn't made it to the top of my long list yet), I have spent a lot of time yelling 'No, don't do that!' at the characters in Kristen Lavransdatter, The Power and the Glory, etc. My sister and I have long had a running joke that you can tell the good guys in a Christian novel because they drink soda instead of beer. ;-) People cuss and drink and make poor choices and lead lifestyles that lead them into sin and brokenness, and acknowledgement of that makes for compelling reading.
That said ... there are a couple of things that when I see them in a novel do make me truly uncomfortable, and one of those is the use of Christ's name as an expletive. After long consideration, it seems to me that this more than many other situations found in the pages of a novel is something that actually draws the author (and in some ways the reader) into the sin. In order to place those words into a person's mouth, it seems to me that the author him- or herself has to be breaking the commandment, and the reader is exposed in a way that's often hard to skip because it is scattered throughout the dialogue rather than concentrated in one place (rather than, for example, an on-the-page sex scene). Much of the rest of the sin and brokenness found in a novel (though I'm sure there are other examples) doesn't seem to me to require the sin itself in order to describe it. That's not to say characters can't cuss - but there are a whole plethora of other cuss words available that people use all the time.
Anyway. I am certain others may not agree with this perspective ... but these have been my thoughts on this particular topic over the years. Just thought I’d toss them out there. :-)