Making plans for the holiday, one of us had dubbed it the Good Country People road trip. But when you have a carful of people making their way from Atlanta to Florida, via the highways of Georgia and the back roads of Alabama, it’s another story by Flannery O’Connor that comes to mind.

En route I reread A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Forget carsickness; the best kind of queasiness is brought on by O’Connor’s dark, sly gem about a car journey south that goes badly wrong.

We were in that car for seven hours, and we saw much of what the grandmother in O’Connor’s story saw, as her son drove that same route: “Stone Mountain; the blue granite . . . and the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple . . . the various crops that made rows of green lacework on the ground.”

There was no stowaway cat – the catalyst of the story’s catastrophe – although there were frequent iPhone updates from one passenger’s dogsitter.

O’Connor understood attachment-pet- parenting as well as she understood everything else humans do – such as the way we always want to drive down one more dirt road, just to see.

We made it farther than O’Connor’s family did, to Topsail state park, with its turquoise waters and endless dunes. But then the grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida: that was the beginning of the trouble.

– as told to Sara Keating

Belinda McKeon’s debut novel, Solace, was the 2011 Bord Gáis Irish Book of the Year