New Flannery O'Connor biography out

From the review in The NY Times. Flannery O'Connor had lupus and interesting, both pictures the NYT used to illustrate the review showed her crutches (pictured). Here's the section that mentions her lupus:

She was a connoisseur of racial jokes. She believed that her audience was “hostile” and that “a writer with Christian concerns needed to take ever more violent means to get her vision across to them.” She spent the last 13 years of her life in Milledgeville, most of them on crutches, her bones and joints ravaged by lupus. She died of lupus, her father as well. Sometimes she painted.

Describing her self-portrait with a pheasant cock, she wrote: “I very much like the look of the pheasant cock. He has horns and a face like the Devil. The self-portrait was made . . . after a very acute siege. . . . I was taking cortisone which gives you what they call a moon face and my hair had fallen out to a large extent due to the high fever, so I looked pretty much like the portrait. When I painted it, I didn’t look either at myself in the mirror or at the bird. I knew what we both looked like.”

The massive doses of cortisone she took arguably propelled her to complete “Wise Blood.” The drug is known to jazz the mind. “Cortisone makes you think night and day,” she said. One reviewer, Robert Giroux recalled, “said that it’s a work of insanity, the writer is insane.”