Diane Goodman Loves “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Diane Goodman lives in Miami Beach where she owns her own catering company and teaches fiction writing part-time at the University of Miami. She’s just published her second collection of short stories, The Plated Heart. Here, she shares some of the many reasons she loves the title story of Flannery O’Connor’s debut collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

I love how the trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled, how the children’s mother has a face that was as broad and innocent as a cabbage, how the grandmother—believing in her own empty propriety—wears white gloves, dispenses meaningless commentary and advice, eats a peanut butter sandwich and a single olive in the family car on a trip she does not want to take, on a trip no one in the family wants her to take. I love how the tension of the trip is imprisoned in the car, how it is the backdrop for the tragedy.

I love the perfect names—John Wesley & June Star, Red Sammy Butts, Pitty Sing, Bobby Lee and Hiram and the Misfit.

I love the way the grandmother’s self-righteousness and stubborn need to asset her importance in a family that treats her as little more than a nuisance jolts out of a demi-sleep, certain that she recognizes the landscape as a place from her past and I love the lie she weaves from that mistake: ‘There was a secret panel in this house’, she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing she were. I love what but wishing she were does: recreate the pinpoint pain of the grandmother’s lost chances, create the inevitable pinpoint doom of the now excited children discovering their grandmother has lied, imply what might have happened had she been telling the truth.

I love the miracle of the three sentences when she realizes that the place she’s convinced her son to stop is actually in another state and how her fear is so supreme that it sparks a physical reaction—her feet jump up—upsetting the valise where she has hidden her cat, who springs up and wraps itself around Bailey’s neck causing the car and all its unlikable passengers to roll into a ditch.

I love that the whole tragedy is the Grandmother’s fault. And how it’s not.

I love the way the Grandmother and Bailey and his wife and their bratty, mean-spirited, disrespectful children make you itch to scold or slap them and how traveling with them so intensifies that itch that when Bailey and his family are taken to the woods to be shot, the horror is shaped by an odd satisfaction that any decent person would be ashamed to admit. I love the shame this story fills me with.

I love how the grandmother argues for her life inside her own mistaken revelation and how that revelation is so consistent with everything we know about her that it prohibits any insight that might have saved her; how there are no opportunities for redemption for any of the characters; how even the baby must be shot.

I love The Misfit. I love his quiet steady voice, his row of strong white teeth, how the story he tells is sad and chilling, how I can have the same empathy for the cold-blooded killer who murdered his own father as I do for the terrified old woman with her legs twisted under her in a ditch: I love how I can love and hate them both.

I love that moment when the grandmother has an hallucination borne out of terror—a terror that only a woman who has failed as a mother and whose only son has just been shot can feel—that compels her to call the Misfit one of her own children and to reach out to touch him because she did not know how to touch her own son and now never could again and knows that truth.

And I love the truth the Misfit knows, too, the one that compels him to shoot her in the chest. Not just once, or twice for good measure, but three times because her gesture exploded the instinct that rules him.

I love what else The Misfit knows, that the grandmother would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

And I would have loved to know what Flannery O’Connor knew, which I think must have been everything.

3 June 2006 | selling shorts |