The older evangelical Protestant woman wanted me to read a book she loved, once a huge bestseller, and a very sappy and overpoweringly sentimental book. I didn’t want to read the book the way I didn’t want to eat nothing but saccharine for a week.

She meant well, and she didn’t give up. I offered a trade. I would read her book if she would read the collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters called The Habit of Being. If I was going to suffer, she was going to learn something.

A couple weeks after we started each other’s books, my reading partner asked if we could stop. She had found the book hard to read because she didn’t care about the things O’Connor wrote about, especially (I’m sure) the Catholicism. “But,” she said, “I like Flannery.”

Apparently, she liked her quite a bit. That was something. I wouldn’t have expected her to like O’Connor, given the writer’s strong and often starkly expressed ideas, so completely different from the sentimental stuff this woman liked.

Other people have had the same response: Writing, No, writer, Yes. I think they like her in great part because she saw everything, including herself, starkly and realistically, but also as comical and amusing. She understood that sin, because it makes us stupid, makes us ridiculous.

And that’s something most of us can learn from. She could talk to people about serious matters in part because her humane and amused attitude toward human failure made clear that she was sharing, as part of inviting, not judging and trying to bully people into agreement. They knew from the way she spoke of herself that whatever critical judgments she made of other people, she made of herself. She showed how humane was her faith by being amused by herself.

She Made Fun of Herself

O’Connor, whose 100th birthday we recently celebrated, was a star in the serious literary world of the middle of the last century and an intellectually sophisticated Catholic. She died in 1964, at the age of 39, after suffering for 12 years from lupus.

She made fun of herself, in a sincere way few of us do. (Many people have mastered seeming to make fun of themselves in a way that points to something they want others to notice, a version of the humble brag often seen on Facebook.) She was usually dryly amusing in doing so.

Despite being so talented, she had a lot less ego and vanity than I do, and I’m guessing than many of you do. I think being amused at yourself makes being honest about yourself easier to bear. And maybe it makes you more eager to change, because human beings tend to feel less pain at being bad than in being seen as ridiculous.

For example, from a letter to friends who had given her a home when she was a young (26) and struggling writer: “I had to go have my picture taken for the purposes of Harcourt, Brace. They were all bad. (The pictures.) The one I sent looked as if I had just bitten my grandmother and that this was one of my few pleasures, but all the rest were worse.”

Writing another friend, she wrote about a T-shirt she once had with “a fierce-looking bulldog on it with the word GEORGIA over him. I wore it all the time, it being my policy at that point in life to create an unfavorable impression. My urge for such has to be repressed, as my mother does not approve of making a spectacle of oneself when over thirty.”

“My latest accomplishment is that I flunked the driver’s test last Wednesday. This was just to prove I ain’t adjusted to the modern world,” she wrote. “I drove the patrolman around the block. He sat crouched in the corner, picking his teeth nervously while I went up a hill in the wrong gear, came down on the other side with the car out of control and stopped abruptly on somebody’s lawn. He said, ‘I think you need sommo practice.’” She added, “I did make a hundred on the written part, but this profiteth me nothing.”

She Knew Her Limits

O’Connor had a shrewd understanding of herself as an artist and was willing to admit her limits. She wanted a friend to read a story of hers “that pleases me no end. You will observe that I admire my own work as much if not more than anybody else does. … I feel that this is not quite delicate of me but it may be balanced by the fact that I write a great deal that is not fit to read which I properly destroy.”

To another friend she sent an exchange with a critical reader, “Mrs. N. of Boston,” and asked for it back as she’d have to respond to other such critics in the future. She’d apparently been gracious in her response. She added: “I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

O’Connor was aware of the costs of her failings, as in the rueful comment at the end of her description of childhood dancing lessons: “I was, in my early days, forced to take dancing to throw me into the company of other children and to make me graceful. Nothing I hated worse than the company of other children and I vowed I’d see them all in hell before I would make the first graceful move. The lessons went on for a number of years but I won. In a certain sense.”

She Was Honest About Her Faith

O’Connor’s honesty about herself made her writing about her faith more compelling. The way she failed at popular forms of piety because she knew herself well, for example.

“I hate to say most of these prayers written by saints-in-an-emotional-state,” she wrote a friend who was then close to entering the Catholic Church. “You feel you are wearing somebody else’s finery and I can never describe my heart as ‘burning’ to the Lord (who knows better) without snickering.”

She’d written the same friend a few months before, “I can say about my love of God, is, Lord help me in my lack of it. I distrust pious phrases, particularly when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.”

To another writer, not a Catholic, she wrote about a convent she very much admired, “I am sure the ceremonies at the convent would get me down. I am a long-standing avoider of May processions and such-like nun-inspired doings. I am always thankful the Church doesn’t teach those things are necessary.”

She wrote profoundly about the faith, especially about living as a Catholic in the world. (I could happily quote tens of thousands of words just from The Habit of Being.) Because she’s so honest about herself and her experience, and about other Catholics and the problems in the Church, readers sense they can trust what she says in affirmation.

Why Was Flannery O’Connor So Amused?

Why was she so amused by herself and so honest about it with others? The reason is hidden in the mysteries of human personality and divine grace, but I think her work as a serious writer and her life as a serious Catholic trained her for it.

As a story writer who worked hard to make even her comic and wicked figures realistic, she practiced seeing others as herself, because good stories require rounded characters, not simple flat ones. “It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them — in which case, if you don’t watch out, they cease to be adversaries.” She adds a note about her limitations: “You are mighty right I could do with some learning about souls not my own — only I wouldn’t be knowing where I’m to get that from.”

She also learned to see the world that way because her faith taught her to. (She speaks a lot about this in her letters.) She had an unusually strong sense that there but for the grace of God go I, and also that we don’t know other people very well, especially their sufferings, and must see them with charity.

“I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic,” she wrote a religious skeptic who’d sent her an appreciative letter about her stories. She explained what kind of Catholic she was, and then wrote, “If you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.”

In cherishing the world, Flannery O’Connor was loving her neighbor as herself and doing unto them as she would have done unto her. The result was not bitterness, but love, and love makes us believable.