Flannery O'Connor: A Girl Who Knew Her Own Mind By MaryCarpenter, University of Georgia Press, 2022.

This book does precisely what the University of Georgia's press release promises: Carpenter writes a biography of one of America's most renowned female authors of the twentieth century in a style and format that appeals to and engages young readers. Even the cover photo and title catch the adolescent mindset: the picture is a young O'Connor in bobby socks and loafers, chin in hand, gazing somewhat wistfully out upon her world. The title reinforces the author's independence and individuality in a time of American culture that valued tradition, convention, and conformity—especially in the mid-century rural South. While many single-author scholarly volumes focus on the author's fiction, especially in regard to a particular theoretical approach, Carpenter's investigation of Flannery O'Connor focuses on the details of O'Connor's life, specifically as those details allow O'Connor as a human being to emerge as a life-sized character in her own right. Sections of the book are divided chronologically: Part I: Early Years, 1925–1937; Part II: Education, 1937–1945; Part III: The Writing Life, 1945–1964. The book also contains a prologue (with an anecdote illuminating O'Connor's quirky personality), an epilogue, a timeline with key dates, notes, a bibliography, and an index. The most effective aspect of the book in my mind is the organizational strategy, which I anticipate would be attractive and easy to absorb for young adult readers. Carpenter provides intermittent highlights or exhibits within each chapter (as one example, on page fifty-seven, she explains the nature and purpose of Writing Retreats, in order to make it clear to the uninitiated or naive reader the context of O'Connor's retreat at Yaddo). A second feature is a wide array of illustrations, which strikingly include everything from O'Connor's own cartoons from when she was a student to a picture of a Cochin chicken, like the one she taught to walk backwards. The illustrations provide in-depth and frequent insights into the interior of O'Connor's mind—both as a young woman growing up in the deep, rural South, and as a budding professional writer who is seeking to internalize the world around her in order to prepare it to be reconstructed in her fiction. The early chapters on O'Connor's life in Savannah, Georgia, are particularly astute, both in the research and the analysis which begins to paint a lifelike portrait of the personality of the young artist. Carpenter points to the many ways that young O'Connor would have been considered “odd to the residents of Lafayette Square” (5): she was an only child, which was unusual for a Catholic family; she wore braces on her teeth and heavy dancing shoes on her feet; she had rare exposure to both city and country life as a young person; she was sometimes stiflingly protected by her overcautious mother, Regina; and she was extraordinarily precocious, announcing to her parents at the age of six “that she was no longer a child” (7). Carpenter's coverage of O'Connor's childhood in Georgia, specifically her homes and the influence they had on her worldview, is especially well-done. Carpenter pays homage to the value of education in the author's life, discusses the devastating crisis of O'Connor's father's death to lupus (and her own deteriorating health in young adulthood due to the same disease), and aptly demonstrates how the disease and her strong Catholic faith may have factored into her fiction. If there is a weak aspect of the book, it is what I read as imbalanced referencing of O'Connor's fiction: some works get attention in the exhibit sidebars, others do not. For instance, Carpenter frequently mentions the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” even featuring aspects of it in an exhibit. She cites the famous passage, describing the misfit as a “different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters” (7), but then goes on to what may be an erroneous speculation. She writes that “[w]hen people read the short story that has become Flannery O'Connor's most famous… they wonder how much the young Mary Flannery had thought of herself as a child who did not fit in” (7). While the comparison may be an apt one, it forces a conclusion onto the reader that is subjective at best. I hesitate to insist on exclusively reading an author's fiction as a direct reflection of her life. However, in general, A Girl Who Knew Her Own Mind is a valuable and exciting addition to O'Connor scholarship.