A review by courtneyfalling
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor by

Did not finish book.

DNFing early in the sense I flipped through the introduction, some of the early letters, and some letters toward the end of the collection, and coupled with what I already know about Flannery O’Connor (dropping this here for reference: www.new yorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/how-racist-was-flannery-oconnor/amp), I didn’t feel like this was going to be worth fully reading. I wanted to read a book of letters this year and I’m interested in how her moral pessimism and overall Southern Gothic tone relate to her lupus diagnosis and her father’s lupus death (lots of stuff about illness, time, and the certainty and meaninglessness of pain, thinking especially of “Good Country People”), but I definitely forgot how wildly racist her writing can be.