In the early 1930s a national newsreel crew traveled to Savannah, Georgia, to film a serious six-year-old girl who had trained her pet chicken to walk backward. This episode traces the life of Mary Flannery O’Connor from that strange beginning through her father’s death from lupus in 1941, her early cartoon art that taught her to see the world through exaggeration, her acceptance to the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1945, and her calculated decision to drop the name Mary and enter the literary world as Flannery O’Connor.

We follow the devastating 1952 diagnosis of the same disease that killed her father, her retreat to her mother’s Andalusia Farm, and the disciplined routine of mass, writing, and rest that produced her most influential work. The conversation explores her concept of Christian realism, why she used shocking violence as a spiritual defibrillator for characters closed off to grace, the hundred peacocks that became a recurring symbol, and the vast correspondence that reveals a deeply contradictory figure with publicly progressive politics and privately prejudiced views on race.

• How a political cartoonist’s habit of magnifying a single flaw became her method for writing morally grotesque characters
• Why critics called her a cynic and how she pushed back against that label
• Over 60 lectures delivered across the country despite crushing exhaustion and harsh steroid treatments
• Her decades-long letters with an anonymous Atlanta file clerk later identified as Betty Hester
• Her death at 39 in 1964, the posthumous National Book Award, the film Wildcat, and the paintings found in a Milledgeville attic in 2023