Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read. From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael

Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today, I'm happy to have as my guest, Brad Gooch,

who's written the first full-length biography of Flannery O'Connor. It's called Flannery A Life, and it's published by Little Brown.

I first met Brand Gooch around 20 years ago, and one of the first things that I knew about him was that he was hoping to write a biography of Flannery O'Connor.

What was it that most attracted you to her work?

Well, when I was first reading her work and I was in my 20s, I was also beginning to write stories.

And I think that actually they were an influence because she had this cinematic frontal quality to her work that I

really liked. And at the same time, there was some kind of medieval questing spirituality between

the lines, I think, that I felt. And I didn't know whether that was true or not. And then her letters

came out a few years into my reading the stories.

And then the letters sort of verified what I thought,

that she was interested in tomism and into these reading saints' lives and things like that.

So originally it connected to my work.

And then the idea of

doing a biography was the riddle of how her own stories connected to these letters. The stories

were so violent and extreme. Her letters were obviously, um, mellower, this woman living on a farm

with her mother, reading theology every night before

she went to bed.

...