For a writer of semi-autobiographical fiction, Flannery O’Connor maintained a complex relationship between her real life and her work. When she left the United States for the first time to make the Lourdes Centennial Pilgrimage, she told her cousin she would write about the trip when the “reality had somewhat faded.” For great writers, the act of creation often trumps the experience of the real world. “At the point where you get your writerly vocation,” John Updike said, “you diminish your receptivity to experience.” O’Connor went so far as to say “experience is the greatest deterrent to fiction.” In his recent biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch artfully brings them together.

Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia to Edward F. O’Connor and Regina Cline O’Connor. Her father died from lupus, a disease affecting the connective tissue in the internal organs, when she was fifteen. She graduated from Georgia State College for Women with a Social Sciences degree and received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, and was friends with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, and James Dickey. Like her father before her, she died from complications from lupus in 1964.

Gooch’s book is brimming with im- pressive minutiae—O’Connor’s hemoglobin count on a given day, the ad slogan for her “Kiddie-Koop Crib” (Danger or Safety—Which?), the sweltering temperature at her commencement in Georgia, memories from a phys-ed classmate who said “she was considered dangerous with a golf club.” Fortunately, Gooch is mainly occupied with the facts of O’Connor’s life that are more closely tied to her fiction. He makes constant reference to her pets, her hair, her voice, all of which appear in her short stories—the peacocks in “A Displaced Person,” Ruby’s “mulberry-colored hair” in “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” and the preacher’s “high twangy voice” in “The River.”

Several chapters in the biography are named after her short stories and the characters from her novels, neatly revealing the parallels between her life and her work and drawing new ones. Gooch’s chapter on her death takes the title “Revelation” from the story in Everything That Rises Must Converge, which she finished during her final battle with lupus. His chapter “The Bible Salesman” (the central character in the story “Good Country People”) describes O’Connor’s relationship—and one lifeless kiss —with Erik Langkjaer, a Danish-born textbook representative from Harcourt.

In Gooch’s closing acknowledgments he writes, “My personal test for deciding on projects has always been to write the book I want to read but cannot find on the shelf.” This is a book you want to read—it is funny, often times picturesque, and (fittingly) wise. In his quest to unlock the “coded spiritual autobiography” he perceives in her stories, Gooch does not alienate the reader with a self-congratulatory insider’s guide; rather, he offers the possibility for us to discover it as well.