The Promise of Flawed Characters

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

Flannery O’Connor’s short stories are famously harrowing. But Paul Lisicky, the author of The Narrow Door, says they’re much more than little, mean-spirited torment chambers (and not just because she’s funny). In his essay for this series, he looks closely at “Revelation,” in which a narrow-minded woman responds to public humiliation with surprising generosity. In this, Lisicky sees O’Connor’s vision emerge: The author subjects her characters to humiliation, betrayal, and violence to move them beyond their limitations, giving them the chance to emerge better from the wreckage of what they once were.

is Lisicky’s ode to two loved ones who left him, for very different reasons: About a year after a best friend lost her fight against cancer, his then-husband fell in love with someone else. Lisicky admits that as a memoirist, the temptation is to “turn darkness into light”; especially when writing about death, we tend to burnish painful memories until they shine, trying to offer something redemptive from the ashes. As