Early this year, Martin Scorsese and Bruce Springsteen bonded over an unlikely shared interest in Flannery O’Connor, the Southern Gothic writer known for her depictions of the grotesque. Scorsese urged Springsteen to read her letters “just a few pages a night, every few nights.”

Springsteen noted that O’Connor inspired his album Nebraska, and he added, “If you’re an artist, that darkness is always more interesting than the light. It’s nice when you let the light in at the end of something. But I was always interested in, what were the things that didn’t go right?”