Blood don’t lie: Writing sickness after Flannery O’Connor

Abstract

“Blood don’t lie” is a work of creative nonfiction that seeks to understand writing and sickness through the work of Flannery O’Connor. By analysing her correspondence, biographical details, ephemera and three short stories, this essay applies a feminist disability studies reading to her work and asks: to what extent can the experience of sickness be read “backwards”, from biography to fiction; from reading to reader; and, in the case of both O’Connor and the author, from generation to generation? It identifies the thematic concerns of her work – family, time, sickness and body – and emphasises how they might be employed to counter the resistance of pain to description in language and, further, to explain the relationship between language, power and otherness in writing about sickness. By combining techniques from literary criticism, biography and autobiography in a hybrid form, it produces new writing towards a speculative literature of sickness.