Paul Lisicky is also the author of the memoir Famous Builder and the novels Lawnboy and The Burning House. He teaches graduate writing at the University of Rutgers-Camden.

Paul Lisicky: I didn’t have to train myself to love Flannery O’Connor back when I first encountered her work in a creative-writing workshop. She wasn’t an acquired taste, such as Jane Bowles or Virginia Woolf, writers whom I came to love after several tries. Instantly I got O’Connor’s irreverence, her vitality, her play, her infatuation with human absurdity: snobbery, complacency—all of it. She was a writer who sounded like she was having fun. Bleak fun, to be sure. I could just picture her cracking herself up in front of the typewriter.

And yet the fun never felt easy or slight. I sensed that the work was written by a pretty grave person, someone who didn’t take human foibles lightly. She believed that actions mattered, had consequence. The fun here was never for the sake of an easy laugh. The fun was poised over an abyss, or under a thunderhead—it was hard to know for sure.

The first story I read of hers was “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in which a family confronts a serial killer on a road trip to Florida. As a young writer I was riveted by its division into two halves: the first broadly comic, the second outright devastating, as each member of the family is shot, one by one by one. In workshops I’d been taught to value control and consistency. So much of what was praised in class seemed to be in sync with some imaginary command to strictness, as if characters weren’t allowed to be messy, chaotic creatures on the page. Weren’t we just reinforcing the social order with all these rules? Why weren’t we questioning them? But O’Connor’s story violated all that. It unleashed some anarchy—part God, part Devil—and made a new kind of story. Sure, it had the look of a linear story but it also managed to demolish such a story. Her example gave me permission to be bolder on the page, though it would take me years to make use of that permission.

I loved “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” for its ability to shake me into my bones—try reading the whole thing aloud sometime and you’ll hear exactly what I mean. But the story that really got to me was “Revelation.” Its effect might not be as dramatic as “A Good Man”—after all, no one is murdered—but a different kind of violence takes place. Here, a 47-year-old woman is humiliated by a young, college-educated woman in front of strangers.

The bulk of the story transpires in a doctor’s waiting room, in which the central character, Ruby Turpin, accompanies her laconic husband, Claude, to his doctor’s appointment. She’s one of those people who’s uncomfortable with silence, terrified of self-examination, though she doesn’t yet know that about herself. She talks and talks and talks and talks and talks. She needs to be the center of attention and makes sure that happens by addressing everyone in the room, enfolding them into her little monarchy. But she isn’t exactly interested in making connections with others. The scene is about all about her desire to perform a certain version of herself: respectable, quick to laugh, grateful, blessed by Jesus for her “good disposition.” The small space contains a cross-section of 1960s small-town Georgia society: a “leathery, old woman,” in a cotton print dress; a mother with “snuff-stained lips” and her little boy; a “stylish, pleasant” lady; and her scowling daughter, Mary Grace, head buried in a textbook titled Human Development.