"Blood Don't Lie": The Diseased Family in Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge

Flannery O'Connor struggled with a debilitating case of systemic lupus erythmatosus for much of her adult life. In "'Blood Don't Lie': The Diseased Family in Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge," Susanna Gilbert argues that this struggle makes its way into her fiction not only literally--through images of blood, disease, death, and twisted parent-child relationships--but figuratively, as well, as many of the stories in her final collection replicate the very dynamics of her disease--its omnipresent symptoms, sudden, surprising violence, and, most importantly, its grotesque drama of the self against the self.