"Blood don't lie": the diseased family in Flannery O'Connor's Everything that rises must converge.

At the age of thirty-nine, Flannery O'Connor succumbed to her body's battle with itself. Stricken when she was twenty-five with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, the autoimmune disorder that eventually took her life and that killed her father before her, O'Connor spent the last fourteen years of her life a dependent invalid in her mother's home. In this essay I will argue that O'Connor's struggle with lupus makes its way into her fiction not only literally--through images of [End Page 114] blood, disease, death, and twisted parent-child relationships--but figuratively as well. Specifically, I will suggest that many of the stories in O'Connor's final collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, replicate not only the dynamics of her relationship with her parents but, more interestingly, the dynamics of her disease--its omnipresent symptoms; sudden, surprising ferocity; and, most importantly, its grotesque drama of the self against the self. 2