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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
"But Shapland has slightly oversold her thesis about the closeting of McCullers."
"After all, it's often by looking back that we move the conversation forward, and by inhabiting the lives of others that we might glimpse pieces of our own."
"...[a] deft, graceful literary debut ..."
"Shapland's intimate admissions are, like her subject...elusive ..."
"beautifully and sparsely written."
"You meet Harriet the Spy with that frisson of recognition."
"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."
"It's a diminishment that invites another kind of invisibility and I think McCullers (and all of them) would have despised it ..."
"Celebrating McCullers, love, and the idea that every story told includes something of its teller, Shapland writes an involving literary journey of the self."
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