Home › Books › My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
by
28/99
Critics' Rating Index
48/99
Readers' Rating Index
84/99
Scholars' Citation Index
92/99
Volume of Reviews
55/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
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
"beautifully and sparsely written."
"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."
"I so wished for more [confessional] moments ..."
"But Shapland has slightly oversold her thesis about the closeting of McCullers."
"Celebrating McCullers, love, and the idea that every story told includes something of its teller, Shapland writes an involving literary journey of the self."
"Its mere existence stands as a warning of the cul-de-sac into which publishing has lately wandered (I mean, run, blindfolded, at full tilt)."
"The difficulty in overcoming this instinct to code and conceal is what gives Shapland's book its considerable stakes ..."
"If McCullers provided salvation, helping Shapland emerge once and for all from the closet, now the younger writer has an opportunity to return the favor."
"The question that propels Shapland's book is not whether or not Carson was a lesbian; she's not trying to prove, exactly."
"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."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!