On the one hand, the woman could write short stories unlike anything else around...and often about things she had no personal experience with...on the other, her feelings on gay people (though to be as fair as possible, I'll add that she felt any love not directly tied to God was "perverse") and civil rights (little as we know about those feelings) make me cringe a lot. (When a friend of hers spoke of being committed to the civil rights movement, O'Connor responded by telling her racist jokes.)
Her recently published A Prayer Journal shows a woman of devout faith, yet it is this kind of faith (that comes from a woman of such narrow, sanctimonious and often prejudiced views) that confuses me. How can someone who writes:
I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside. I am mediocre of spirit but there is hope. I am at least of the spirit and that means alive.
be the same woman who would react to a friend's news that way? Be someone so judgmental of others who do not share her beliefs?
I often feel so mixed up and torn with guilt inside when I find out a writer I once truly enjoyed is not whom I thought she (or he) was.
Of course, it's still easier and different with people you can easily put away (i.e. authors, musicians, actors or actresses) but what do you when people in your own life feel a way that appalls you? Then, it's not so easy to put down a book or turn off a song, especially if you like them before you learn of their views...
For more from Flannery O'Connor's A Prayer Journal, you can read here:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/my-dear-god
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