April 1: Is This a Joke? - No. 334
No, just Flannery O’Connor + the best dinner hack
A READER EMAILED ASKING if chocolate sauerkraut cake or tomato soup cake would be the better April Fool’s dessert.
Didn’t we already celebrate April Fool’s the day of the military group chat? Or when JD Vance visited Greenland and expected a warm welcome? What about when the IRS staff was trimmed pre-tax season?
Considering the choice of a crazy cake to the bizarre happenings right now, either a cake packed with sauerkraut or a spice cake beginning with a can of tomato soup might be surprisingly good choices.
As I was driving through the rural countryside of Georgia this past week on book tour, I thought back to that email conversation and the irony of it.
En route from Athens south to Milledgeville on US Highway 441, I was heading to Andalusia, the historic home of writer Flannery O’Connor, and listening to O‘Connor along the way.
Many of her short stories will put you in a bad humor, as my grandmother used to say. O’Connor wrote to shock those of us who hope for the comfort of happy endings. She wove tales as thick and repugnant as the Georgia spring pollen clinging to my windshield and giving everyone sneezing fits.
O’Connor let horrible things happen—the grandmother was shot at the end of A Good Man is Hard to Find. In her stories, there are no manners or Golden Rule. The gentle wisdom of children cannot be found; they are outsiders often referred to simply as ‘’The Child.’’
But O’Connor, too, was an outsider. Born in Savannah, she was a devout Catholic in the fundamentalist protestant world of the 1950s South. Her parents were of Irish ancestry, and she was accustomed to exclusion. Stricken with Lupus in her 20s, she was an up-and-coming writer who studied in Iowa and was working in New York when she was forced to come back home, prescribed powerful steroids that damaged her bones, and relied on leg braces and crutches to get around.
She personally endured cruelty, so why would we ever dream her writing, often described as Southern Gothic, would be any different? She described herself as someone with a "you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex.’’