SOURCE: Gilbert, Susanna. “‘Blood Don't Lie’: The Diseased Family in Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Literature and Medicine 18, no. 1 (spring 1999): 114-31.

In the following essay, Gilbert investigates the way in which O'Connor's illness informs her last collection of short fiction, Everything That Rises Must Converge.

Storytelling seems to be a natural reaction to illness. … Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.

—Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness

Asbury lay with a rigid outraged stare while the privacy of his blood was invaded by this idiot. “Slowly Lord but sure,” Block sang in a murmuring voice, “Oh slowly Lord but sure.” When the syringe was full, he withdrew the needle. “Blood don't lie,” he said.

—Flannery O'Connor, “The Enduring Chill”

The wolf, I'm afraid, is inside tearing up the place.

—Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being [The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor]¹

At the age...