It’s jarring, maybe, to think of Flannery O’Connor as an old lady. Then again, to our eyes, in photographs from the last years of her life, maybe she looks already old. In our imagination, she stands forever on the front porch steps of Andalusia, the Georgia farm where she lived with her mother, in her cat-eyed glasses, staid housedresses, puffs of hair either side of her face. I was born in November 1964, three months and three days after O’Connor’s death. My bookish grandmother, married in 1925, the year O’Connor was born, looked in her 60s an awful lot like those photos. Women in their 30s don’t look like that anymore.
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