"And how is your Oversoul today?"

            Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) is known as a creative for her body of literary work; she wrote several stories, the most famous of which is “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away). She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yaddo; she counted several impressive literary contemporaries as friends. By all means, she was good at what she did. But what has most impressed me about O’Connor is not her literature—although I have read all of it, and it is spectacularly moving—but the way in which she conducted her daily life.

            There are three realities of Flannery O’Connor’s life that allowed her to be as especially cognizant of her existence as she was. The first is that she was diagnosed with lupus at a relatively young age; the second is that she maintained a prolific number of pen-pals; the third, her Catholic faith. Being diagnosed with lupus in the 1940s was far different from today; although treatments had improved from where they had been when O’Connor’s father died of it in her childhood, they were not yet as effective as they are today. The standard of treatment, combined with the reality of her father’s death from the same disease, made O’Connor hyperaware of her mortality, and, I believe, motivated her to create as much as she could with the time she had. Her faith played a role in her firm belief in the need to be creative as well, and her numerous pen pals continued to push her thought in new and different directions throughout her life. I am sure that her correspondences, particularly those with Maryat Lee and a friend only identified as “A.” in the collection of letters published posthumously by close friend Sally Fitzgerald, impacted the direction her fiction took, but more importantly, those correspondences impacted the direction of her thought and her life. It is this aspect of Flannery O’Connor’s existence that has made the most impact on my own, thanks to reading The Habit of Being (the letter collection), and that most clearly illustrates the importance of collaboration in creativity.

            Flannery’s correspondence with Maryat Lee reminds me of the collaboration between Kahneman and Tversky in this week’s reading. The two women shared several background characteristics, but were diametrically opposed in personality, belief, and life trajectory. Where O’Connor was chronically ill, shrewd, pragmatic, devoutly Catholicic, and rarely strayed from her Midgeville, Georgia farm, Lee was an adventurous, theater-writing expat who grabbed at opportunities as they arose and questioned everything that Flannery held close. This tangential sharing of domain but opposition in just about everything else mirrors the relationship Kahneman and Tversky started out with, and I believe is what made both such forceful pairs. Although O’Connor and Lee never collaborated or published together, they regularly edited for each other, and their exchanges in The Habit of Being are simultaneously the most hilarious and profound things I have had the pleasure of reading. From both of these relationships, I can only conclude that conversing with people who share the language of your domain, but have little else in common, is one of the greatest things a person can do to expand their thought, whether that be in their creative domain or in their everyday existence.

Sources and Additional Reading:

The Habit of Being, Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald

Flannery – A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch

“The Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About How We Think,” by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler for the New Yorker Magazine
Photo from The National Catholic Register