Jenn Shapland > Quotes

“Libraries, archives, and museums all find themselves at the intersection of materiality and the mystical. Perhaps this is why we’re so quiet when we enter them.”
― Jenn Shapland

“I occupy the category woman, and that category must expand to contain me. In all my outfits.”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

“What is the precise evidence for love? Documentation of sexual encounters? Examples of daily intimacies? Easier to tell and corroborate are stories of pain, dramatic events, betrayals. Love meanwhile lives in the mundane, the moment-to-moment exchanges, and can so easily become invisible after the people who shared it are no longer alive. But, of course, it leaves traces.”
― Jenn Shapland

“But also because I don’t feel like I was ever actually in. I feel more like, growing up in a conservative, reticent community, I just didn’t know—for lack of example and lack of vocabulary—what I was, what I could be, that I could love women and still be myself.”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

“Books seem to find me when I’m ready for them, or else I abandon them.”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

“was smiling; I think I was kind of pleased. I remember it as a happy moment. New heights in androgyny achieved! But I also instinctively took it as a kind of flirtation.”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

“Years into this tunnel of research, I’ve solved the mystery of the collection of nightgowns and coats: she was a sick person. She wore, predominately, nightgowns, and often put a beautiful coat over them in photos.”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

“Which is: not masculine, not feminine, but a both that becomes other.”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

“As my friend, lesbian artist Harmony Hammond, writes of coming up in the 1960s and ’70s, “to be both a woman and an artist was considered a contradiction of identities.” And now suddenly I have no choice but to face the possibility that this moment is no different”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

“for a moment I let myself think that maybe this painter was into me because he couldn’t determine my gender without asking,”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

“I was still adjusting to the reality of my diagnosis, the reality that I would almost always feel weak, tired, slow. I spent a lot of time researching other possible explanations for my symptoms, acute conditions that could be cured expediently. It felt better to me to imagine a parasite than to accept that this sloth-like creature was just who I was. Only later did it occur to me that I might very well be feeling possessed in other ways.”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

“But learning and knowing and thinking are not modes of healing, repair.”
― Jenn Shapland, Thin Skin: Essays

“comfort and ease of conversations centered around work and ideas. Hardly anyone is talking about their kids. I”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir