In May 2023, two dozen small paintings by Flannery O'Connor were found in her childhood home in Georgia. With the recent passing of her cousin's protector, Louise Florencourt, the works attracted attention from relatives and scholars. Bruce Gentry and Sarah Gordon, editors of the Flannery O'Connor Review, explored the residence prior to the paintings' display. The conversation drifted to the film 'Wildcat,' directed by Ethan Hawke, which was criticized for numerous factual inaccuracies but praised for capturing O'Connor’s complex relationship with her mother, a theme reflected in her writing.
On the way over, the two compared notes on 'Wildcat,' the 2023 O'Connor bio-pic that Ethan Hawke directed. 'It has five hundred factual errors in it,' Gentry said, singling out O'Connor's supposed crush on the poet Robert Lowell, whom she met at Yaddo. 'But it does capture the tension between mother and daughter, which appears in some form in almost every story,' he said.
'I refuse to see it,' Gordon said of the film. She'd watched an interview with Laura Linney, who played Flannery's mother, Regina. 'She said Regina sent her daughter North to college. Well, I just almost went up in flames right then. I mean, she went to college here.'
'They had a peculiar relationship,' Gentry added. 'But she allowed Flannery to just write. Flannery would box up her laundry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and send it back to Regina to wash it.'
Collection
[
|
...
]