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My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
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About This Book
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is an audacious new form of nonfiction that remakes the boundaries between criticism, biography, and autobiography in search of two identities. While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson and a woman named Annemarie―letters are that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters' language―but does not see Carson as history has portrayed her. And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of Carson's life: She wades through the therapy transcripts; she stays at Carson's childhood home, where she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives Carson's days at her beloved Yaddo. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and Carson, she see the way Carson's story has become a way to articulate something about herself. The results articulate something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories. In genre-defying vignettes, Jenn Shapland interweaves her own story with Carson McCullers's to create a vital new portrait of one of America's most beloved writers, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.
Reviews
"Shapland interweaves candid self-questioning and revealing personal stories with a nuanced portrait of a writer who confessed her loves were 'untouchable' and her feelings 'inarticulable.' A sensitive chronicle of a biographer's search for truth."
"You read A Separate Peace waiting for the teen protagonists to kiss (fraternal love, give me a break)."
"Though her book is composed of vignettes that read like entries in an archive...Shapland is led more by feeling and response ..."
"Surely, the more transparently we acknowledge the stakes, the more likely we are to arrive at a payoff."
"Celebrating McCullers, love, and the idea that every story told includes something of its teller, Shapland writes an involving literary journey of the self."
"It's a diminishment that invites another kind of invisibility and I think McCullers (and all of them) would have despised it ..."
"Only in her bibliography does Shapland mention Sarah Schulman, for instance, a prominent lesbian writer whose multigenre exploration of McCullers—essays, a play, a projected novel, and an as yet unrealized film—spans twenty years.6 Similarly, although Shapland visited McCullers's childhood home in Georgia, fondling her possessions and breathing her air, she avoided meeting anyone who had known her and who might offer competing impressions: 'None of these is my Carson.'"
"What she's trying to do is see herself in history, show herself (and us) that Carson and other queer people have always lived, always loved, always made community for themselves ..."
"The more Shapland learns about the legendary writer, the more she learns about herself and the more readers are apt to question the labels we impose on one another."
"beautifully and sparsely written."
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