Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and someone with great taste in books: look at her YouTube channel and you’ll find her speaking about Chesterton, Lewis, Dostoevsky, and Flannery O’Connor. She also has a terrific Substack, The Scandal of Reading.
Earlier this year, I read her edited version of O’Connor’s unfinished novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage? and was struck by how much I missed O’Connor’s voice and how grateful I was that somebody assembled these drafts into a book. I interviewed Jessica on the New Books Network and am glad to say that she is the first guest on the Pages and Frames podcast. We talked about Wildcat, Ethan Hawke’s film about O’Connor’s life and work. Thank you, Jessica!
“There's a lot of other scholars that saw it and thought, OK, well, this is inaccurate and this isn't accurate—and I just didn't do that. I didn't think historical accuracy was really the point. I thought they did such a great job instead about trying to portray a narrative in which a woman prioritizes faith and comes to believe that her suffering has a purpose, that her fiction has a role to play in the world and that her life is about that calling to write great works of literature. I loved all of that.” —Jessica Hooten Wilson on Wildcat
You can listen to the interview above or watch the video of it here:
If you’re interested in my longer review of Wildcat, you can find that here.
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Jessica Hooten Wilson and Wildcat