Although her fiction was jarring and memorable, Flannery O’Connor’s nonfiction is also rich: replete with sharp insights about culture and craft. In her 1957 essay The Fiction Writer and His Country, O’Connor affirmed: “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” When writing for like-minded audiences, the Christian novelist might “relax a little” and “use more normal means”. Often, though, the writer of faith must use “more violent means” of narrative: “you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures”.