Thirty years ago, a young Brad Gooch got in touch with Flannery O’Connor’s old friend Sally Fitzgerald, who had just edited a posthumous collection of O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being. Gooch—at the time, the author of a single chapbook of poetry—proposed to write a biography of O’Connor, and wondered if this would interfere with Fitzgerald’s own plans in that direction. The answer was yes, though Fitzgerald was kind enough to add: “Should I ever feel the need of an assistant, I will certainly think of you and your proposal.” Time passed. Finally, in 2003, Gooch—by now the author of an acclaimed biography of Frank O’Hara, City Poet, and several other books—was casting about for another project, when it occurred to him that Fitzgerald had died three years before, at eighty-three, without ever publishing her biography. One possible reason was suggested, ominously, by the elusive subject herself: “As for biographies,” O’Connor had written, “there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”
