In some ways, I’m a Southern writer (though not exclusively one), and I think it’d be impossible to be any kind of Southern writer writing about the nineteen-fifties without thinking of Flannery O'Connor. I have a deeply complicated relationship with her work; though I do feel in conversation with it, it’s not always a civil conversation. Sometimes, it’s a blistering argument. I love so much about O’Connor—her wit, her daggers, her fury—and, at the same time, I also find her brand of Catholicism hard to take, or maybe internally incongruent, since her stories read to me as if she actually ascribes to the Calvinist idea of double predestination, that God has already decided who will be saved and who will be damned. I get the impression that she sees nearly everyone as already damned, which strikes me as both cynical and fundamentally untrue. I love human beings enough to trust that they will try to do their best, and will always be disappointed when their worst selves take over. I think we’re all equally saved and damned, and all of our dark and light angels wrestle ceaselessly, and there will never be a clear winner even at the moment of death. In the case of some artists, those same angels will keep wrestling in the work after death, as long as there is an audience to witness it.
the new yorker, july 4, 2022
conversation about her short story To Sunland
