In the fall of 2012, when I was suffering from the rheumatic symptoms of what I called my “phantom illness,” I read Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s first of two novels. I read the book over the course of several warm baths I took to ease the ache in my joints.

None of the doctors I visited had offered a conclusive diagnosis for my complaints, which, in addition to arthritic pain, included traveling rashes, fatigue, mental fogginess, amenorrhea, occasional numbness and discoloration in my fingers and toes, and the loss of about half of the hair from my head.

I had begun to feel ill while living in Savannah, Georgia, and soon after, at age twenty-nine, I relocated to my mother’s home, in North Carolina, for what I believed would be a temporary spell of medical tourism: visits to family doctors who might offer referrals to specialists at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill. I left my clothes and furniture and books in Savannah and returned often enough to convince myself that I had not, in actuality, moved in with my mother.

When I took Wise Blood into the bath that fall, I had maintained a moderate interest in O’Connor and her work. I found the paperback volume at my mother’s house, on a shelf filled with novels I supposedly studied in college literature courses. I had certainly, if intermittently, read from The Complete Short Stories, a chronological printing of O’Connor’s short fiction with an introduction by her editor Robert Giroux; and I had once visited the author’s childhood home in Savannah. I had seen the bathtub the author filled with pillows before climbing in to read stories as a young girl and the view of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, where the family attended church, framed by every street-facing window...READ MORE