Flannery and Regina: The Andalusia Chronicles with Carol Loeb Shloss

So I want to start by getting your reaction, your hot take, as the kids say today.

I want to get your reaction to these four words, writers and their mothers.

Well, actually, I'm more comfortable, or what's the word I want to use? I more often write about fathers and their daughters.

And the question in those cases, how do you survive having a father who's created most of or an important part of Western civilization? What are your survival strategies? How do you just get on with your life and make it into something whole? And what is your relationship with your father? To write about a daughter and her mother was a real challenge.

And I loved it because the daughter is the brilliant one and the mother is kind of trying to catch up.

So it was another intergenerational book about a parent and a child, but the dynamics were all changed.

It was complicated by the fact that Flannery was sick for a while, well, for most of her life, so she was dependent upon the mother who didn't really get what she was doing.

In one of her books, she writes about, it's called Why Do the Heathens Rage?, She writes about a son who's always sitting at the typewriter and says the sound of the typewriter made his mother sick.

So Flannery knew that she had to create some strategy for getting along with the very person who didn't get it.

The very person who fell asleep when she was reading her graphs.

So it was a really interesting variation on a parent-child relationship.

Yeah, that's great.

Her mother, of course, who said, why can't you write something nice like Gone with the Wind? Exactly.

So let's set up for our listeners here how Flannery and Regina ended up living together at Andalusia, because that wasn't in the plan, I think, for either of them.

So how did they end up together at this farm?

Well, Flannery got sick.

She was at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, very happily there, planning a cosmopolitan life, hoping to live in New York and then living in a different arrangement with Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in the country.

So she was going home for Christmas, and on the train ride there, she got so sick she couldn't walk when she got off the train.

She had to be carried to a hospital.

So there was a period of time when Regina would not even tell Flannery.

what was wrong, that she had lupus because lupus had killed her father.

So it carried a heavy emotional burden for both of them.

And at the time, Regina was living in a kind of a southern mansion.

I call it the Green Street House.

And once she understood that she and Flannery were going to have to coexist, they moved out to the farm owned by Regina's older brother.