Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.
ATTRIBUTION:
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), U.S. fiction writer and essayist. Mystery and Manners, part 2 (1969).
Written in 1957. O’Connor, a lifelong Georgian, invented many fictional characters often described as freakish or “grotesque.” She was a committed Roman Catholic.
