Overall, the reviews of the Brad Gooch biography of Flannery O’Connor have been extremely positive, even though many reviewers admit the difficulties of writing about an author who said about her own life: “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.”
Over at the Washington Post, Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor is reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, who says “[Gooch] has done an earnest, respectful but mercifully not hagiographic job.”
The phrase, repeated by many of the reviewers and in the New York Times, is that this is the first major biography of O’Connor. This NYT review highlights the peacocks, lupus, and gothic style, as well as what Gooch uncovers:
“[Gooch] also had access to a cache of recently revealed, hugely illuminating letters between O’Connor and her friend Betty Hester, who had a great crush on her. And he tracked down unpublished correspondence between O’Connor and Erik Langkjaer, the rare man known to have romantically attracted her.”
At the LA Times, David Ulin praises the bio:
“Gooch is brilliant on the fiction, passionate and smart, able to contextualize both the individual pieces and the scope of the career. He astutely notes that, despite producing two novels, “Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away,” O’Connor was not really a novelist, which is why those books don’t quite hold up. She was, rather, perhaps the greatest 20th century American practitioner of the short story, a writer with an acute moral vision who understood that faith and salvation do not necessarily go hand in hand.”
