Until moving to Savannah, Georgia, I’d never celebrated the birthday of a dead person. Sure, I mentally commemorated my long-gone father’s birthday each December. But I’m talking full-blown birthday party with cake, singing, games, party hats, and a parade to boot.

One Sunday in March 2014, a woman I met soon after moving to Savannah invited me to the annual community-wide celebration honoring Flannery O’Connor in Lafayette Square, a park across the street from Flannery’s childhood home. We arrived to find live chickens, someone wearing a gorilla suit (check out Flannery’s novel Wise Blood), and the biggest birthday cake I’d ever seen. Flannery loved fowl of all kinds and, at 5, taught a chicken to walk backwards. We joined the parade of minstrels and Flannery look-alikes wearing gloves, hats and shirtwaist dresses from a bygone era.   

Flannery’s writing was weird, my friend recalled. She hadn’t taken to it in college and neither had I. The more fans I meet, the more I notice this pattern. Somehow, though, Flannery seems to circle back. Indeed, the month before, I’d attended the launch of A Prayer Journal, a collection of recently discovered diary entries Flannery wrote during 1946-1947 while a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I’d never been to a book launch in a church either, much less one known as the Notre Dame of the South — the Cathedral-Basilica of St. John the Baptist. A month later, I was parading around Lafayette Square — yes, that Lafayette — feeling right at home. 

But who, really, was this woman who inspired such devotion — and tomfoolery — long after she was gone? Whose writing has fueled the imagination of multiple filmmakers, rock stars, biographers and comics?  

I decided she merited a second look. 

Born Mary Flannery O’Connor on March 25, 1935, Flannery wrote two novels and 32 short stories before dying from lupus in 1964 at 39. She dropped the conspicuous Catholic “Mary” when she became a published author. In 1972, she won the National Book Award posthumously for The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. 

As Janie Bragg, executive director of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home Foundation, describes it, Flannery’s life can essentially be divided into three parts. From birth until 13, she lived in Savannah. During the middle third, she traveled around, residing in Atlanta for a short time with her family, attending college and grad school, writing at the Yaddo artist’s colony, and living briefly in New York and Connecticut with friends. During the final third, she wrote most of her works after returning to Andalusia, the family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she struggled with lupus, which had also taken her father’s life when Flannery was 15. 

Set in the South, often with grotesque characters, her stories of good and evil were peppered with dark humor. But as Bishop Barron says, grace always breaks through, usually “in some kind of painful way.” She was Catholic to the core, from cradle to grave. Catholicism immersed her writing, but it was often covert to the uninitiated like me. Today, Flannery is widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists, short-story writers and Catholic apologists of the 20th century.

Over time, her family’s modest three-story row house at 207 East Charleton Street fell out of family hands. But in 1989, a group of Savannah professors bought and restored it to Depression-era condition, down to the paint. Many years later, I became president of the foundation they formed. During my time on the board, I often found myself wondering what Flannery would think about any number of things and would turn to The Habit of Being, her posthumously published letters. On the 30th-anniversary celebration of the foundation’s formation, I found this July 31 entry, written on the same day, decades earlier. Flannery had remarked about another foundation and quipped that “any bunch of nuts can get up and call themselves a Foundation.” We raised our glasses to Flannery. We could hear her saying that even now. 

Today, Flannery fans make their way to her home from as far away as Australia and Japan. 

A month after that first parade, I crossed the threshold of her home for the first time to attend the monthly meeting of the Peacock Guild Writer’s Salon. And for the next three years, on Tuesday nights, I sat in Flannery’s parlor and workshopped my writing with other local writers.

Slowly, Flannery became my muse. Like her, I now wrote to uncover what I believed. I turned to her prayer journal again and again. “Maybe I’m mediocre,” she wrote. “[P]lease help me dear God to be a good writer,” and “[P]lease let Christian principles permeate my writing.” How strange it felt that my prayers at mid-life echoed the yearnings of a 19-year-old girl destined to become one of the greats. Spurred on by Flannery’s childlike faith and courage, I leaned into the vulnerability Flannery had allowed herself and wrote my own deeply personal story of betrayal and redemption. In her writing, Flannery held up a mirror to her audience. In a similar way, I hoped my memoir would allow others going through a painful family crisis to see their reflection in my story and find healing.

In 2018, I was confirmed into the Catholic Church at the cathedral-basilica, where Flannery was baptized and confirmed. And then I became president of the foundation. When I faced a serious health crisis, I imagined Flannery plunking away on her typewriter, her crutches against her bedroom wall. “I think perhaps hope can only be realized by contrasting it with despair,” she wrote in her journal. “And I am too lazy to despair.” I wouldn’t either. During a pilgrimage to the Flannery archives at Emory University, I held that prayer journal in my hands. 

A few weeks later, the COVID-19 crisis hit. The Flannery home closed for tours. The ground-floor rental and donations would have to keep it afloat until we reopened, who knew when. To lift local spirits, on Flannery’s birthday, a fan organized an online parade. I gave an address in front of the house, across the street from an empty Lafayette Square.  

And now, Flannery is 100, and it’s her birthday again. 

And rather than a single day, the foundation planned a yearlong extravaganza, starting with the first installment of the home’s ongoing lecture series entitled “Flannery O’Connor: Faith, Race, and Disability.” The February panel discussion was held at the Beach Institute African American Cultural Center, a fitting venue to discuss the woman who had written from the Deep South during the years leading up to the civil rights movement and had been canceled in 2020 by a Catholic university that discovered racist language in her private correspondence. I shuddered too when I came across those words. 

At the talk, retired Savannah State University professor Patricia West observed that Flannery’s real life and work was filled with African American people, her story The Displaced Person just one example. To cancel Flannery would be to cancel her contribution to the scholarship of African American culture, which West has begun to chronicle. Fordham professor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell pointed out that Flannery “exposed the evils of racism” in her fiction while actively working out her own ambivalence and need for conversion.

For a time, I felt displaced after selling the house in Brooklyn I could no longer afford. But Flannery and the city that had formed her had also taken me in. Like me, like us, and like the characters she wrote about, Flannery was also entitled to grace. 

And so, the following month, her childhood home planned the biggest weekend long birthday bash anybody in Savannah had ever had.

As Flannery’s birthday approached, and I crossed off the dates in my calendar, I reminded myself of what she had said in a lecture talking about my favorite story of hers — A Good Man Is Hard to Find — and that was to “be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace.”