O’Connor was a devout Catholic and her writings were filled with irony, symbolism and other tasty tidbits with just a hint of subtle cynicism that made her work enjoyable.  I have a caricature in my mind of a woman who probably didn’t suffer fools kindly.

More importantly, and this is something I never really paid attention to until now, O’Connor had lupus and died at the young age of 39 due to complications from the disease.

Today, I stumbled across a new book written about the young author and in reading the review I learned something else about O’Connor, she actually made a pilgrimage to Lourdes.  The book is by Brad Gooth entitled Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (Little, Brown, 416 pp., $30),

‘I am one of those people who could die for his religion sooner than take a bath for it,” Flannery O’Connor wrote during the spring of 1958, after her rich Savannah cousin Katie Semmes had paid for a pilgrimage to the healing waters of Lourdes for O’Connor, who was suffering from lupus, and for her mother, Regina.

I will admit being more interested in her writings than her life but now knowing she had lupus, dealt with it, continued writing through it and actually made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, well heck, that’s very interesting.  In fact, it’s so interesting I’ll be looking for the book this weekend.  (Ugh, I really need to get a Kindle).

The section from the review on the book I found interesting about her trip to Lourdes is the following:

Safely home at her mother’s farm of Andalusia, near Milledgeville, Georgia, O’Connor sighed, “My capacity for staying home is now 100 percent.” She had a routine physical examination to learn what further damage the lupus had done. “Quite startling to her,” as Brad Gooch writes in his brisk biography of O’Connor, was the news from her doctor of “an X ray showing that her hip had unexpectedly begun to calcify. She was now free to walk about her room without crutches.” Perhaps she shared the skepticism of Zola, whose novel Lourdes she was given on the trip, and who famously quipped that he saw a lot of abandoned crutches on the road from Lourdes but no artificial legs. Or perhaps she disliked the vulgarity of miracles on demand. In any case, it was not physical health that O’Connor was after, at Lourdes or anywhere else. “I prayed there for the novel I was working on, not for my bones, which I care about less,” she wrote.

Interesting, “or perhaps she disliked the vulgarity of miracles on demand.”  Yes, subtle cynicism.  I love it.