Drastic Unalikes: Flannery O’Connor and Her Mother

Flannery O’Connor enthusiasts know that she spent the final thirteen years of her life (1951-64) living with her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, on the family farm called Andalusia outside Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery had grown up and attended college. Against her wishes, she had been forced to return home because of her eventually fatal disease, disseminated lupus erythematosus. Though Flannery knew she would never inhabit any other fictional region than the South, she wanted to retain a critical distance from it. She had thrived while living with her dear friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in Connecticut. She feared that a return home would mean the death of her creative life. The pressuring thumb of her domineering mother was likely to make her chafe, distorting if not suppressing her literary imagination. No wonder that so many of her stories are focused on frustrated writers living at home with their domineering mothers—but with the sons and daughters found at much greater fault than the mothers. Flannery later admitted that, to her surprise, she did her best writing during these dozen years at Andalusia.