The Wolf Is Tearing Up the Place
“The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place.”
–Flannery O’Connor
The severity of my daughter’s illness didn’t hit me until the day she collapsed at the hospital. An emergency response team whisked her into surgery to drain her lungs. The next morning, her heart. Her autoimmune condition, dubbed Lupus after the Latin word for wolf, the apex canine predator whose bites its facial rashes resemble, had her in its grip.
I remembered that Flannery O’Connor suffered and died prematurely from the same disease, one in which a body’s immune system wreaks warfare on its own organs. As an aspiring writer, I had embraced her stories then thrilled at the chance to teach them in literature and creative writing courses. With my students, although I’d point out the significance of her Catholicism and the South, I rarely referred to her illness. I failed to consider how the debilitating nature of her Lupus flares mandated that she live with her mother and how this development might have shaped her and the stories she chose to tell.
Flannery O’Connor believed in the autonomy of the text. She rejected the idea that her illness fed her preoccupations with distortion, humor, and redemption, saying, “The disease is of no consequence to my writing since validate the grotesque in her stories. Still, her stories are more than their particulars, these critical slants. They speak to the writer ’s statement that “If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.” Sometimes revisiting a familiar story can help us do just that.
