As a writer and Christian thinker and artist, Flannery O'Connor exhibited remarkable insight and observation. Whether I entirely agree with her or not I think she is fascinating. There is no one other than she who could have written many of her books. After having read this book, I am actually looking forward to reading some of her books again. I have started a Good Man is Hard to Find twice without being able to get beyond the initial violence. I'm hoping this gives me a greater understanding of what she is doing in her writing. Certainly I understand her better has a person. ( )

As a writer and Christian thinker and artist, Flannery O'Connor exhibited remarkable insight and observation. Whether I entirely agree with her or not I think she is fascinating. There is no one other than she who could have written many of her books. After having read this book, I am actually looking forward to reading some of her books again. I have started a Good Man is Hard to Find twice without being able to get beyond the initial violence. I'm hoping this gives me a greater understanding of what she is doing in her writing. Certainly I understand her better has a person. ( )

Few 20th century writers, or at least those writers taken seriously by literary scholars and taught in college classrooms, have been as committed to conveying the Christian understanding of grace and redemption as Flannery O'Connor. Yet her stories are so dark, so violent, so grotesque that few readers readily grasp what they are really about.

O'Connor, a devout Catholic who tried to attend Mass every day, made no secret about what her goals were in her fiction, yet most of those who read her novels and short stories see something else in them. She hated reading reviews of her books because reviewers so rarely understood them.

Brad Gooch wrote an excellent biography in 2009, “Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor,” so perhaps another biography wasn't necessary so soon after, yet the much shorter “The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor” by Jonathan Rogers (2012) serves a different end. Rogers, while giving a good summary of her life and making good use of Gooch's book in the process, has another goal in mind. He seeks to discover what made O'Connor tick, what she believed and how those beliefs shaped her fiction.

"My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for," O'Conner once wrote in a letter. These, in fact, may have been the people who liked her stories best. Christians, especially those who were her neighbors in Milledgeville, Ga., either didn't read her books or didn't like them if they did. They were proud of her literary accomplishments but just wished she would write a different kind of fiction, something a bit nicer.

Rogers writes, "For O'Connor, the real horror was never violence or deformity, but damnation." Even her morally worst characters usually find sudden grace by the end of her stories, that "terrible speed of mercy" brought home.

O'Connor suffered from lupus for much of her short life. She was just 39 when she died. She left behind two novels and numerous short stories that will be read, and perhaps occasionally understood, for years to come. ( )

I first was exposed to Flannery O'Connor's writings in college. I was immediately impressed with her stories and read as many as I could at that time. Someone mentioned this book to me, so I thought I'd read it, get a sort of backyard view of the woman who wrote such harsh, sardonic stories.

This wasn't exactly what I'd call a spiritual biography. It was more of an overview of O'Connor's life, with the first fifth of the book glossing over her childhood and the last four fifths of it summarizing her adult life as a writer, with wonderful quotes, excerpts of her personal letters and synopses of her stories. Rogers touches on her Catholic faith, but I wouldn't say this was at all a delving of her spiritual life. Which is what I'd expected and hoped. This may be because O'Connor didn't write much about herself. And she wasn't very sociable either. But I did get a picture of what she was like. A complicated, faithful, talented, eccentric and brilliant studier of personal dynamics, someone you can't pigeon-hole as a 'Southern Writer", as so many did. She was so much more than that.
I enjoyed this book despite its brevity and cursory information and am inspired now to go back and re-read her stories, and read her two novels. ( )