For a writer of semi-autobiographical fiction, Flannery O’Connor maintained a complex relationship between her real life and her work. When she left the United States for the first time to make the Lourdes Centennial Pilgrimage, she told her cousin she would write about the trip when the “reality had somewhat faded.” For great writers, the act of creation often trumps the experience of the real world. “At the point where you get your writerly vocation,” John Updike said, “you diminish your receptivity to experience.” O’Connor went so far as to say “experience is the greatest deterrent to fiction.” In his recent biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch artfully brings them together.

Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia to Edward F. O’Connor and Regina Cline O’Connor. Her father died from lupus, a disease affecting the connective tissue in the internal organs, when she was fifteen. She graduated from Georgia State College for Women with a Social Sciences degree and received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, and was friends with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, and James Dickey. Like her father before her, she died from complications from lupus in 1964.

Gooch’s book is brimming with im- pressive minutiae—O’Connor’s hemoglobin count on a given day, the ad slogan for her “Kiddie-Koop Crib” (Danger or Safety—Which?), the sweltering temperature at her commencement in Georgia, memories from