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My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir
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 sees 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.
285 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 4, 2020
245 people are currently reading
7428 people want to read
About the author
Jenn Shapland
4 books365 followersJenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, among other honors. Shapland has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently works as an archivist for a visual artist.
Her second book, Thin Skin, will be published in August 2023 by Pantheon Books. Her essays have appeared in New England Review, the New York Times, Outside, Guernica, and Tin House.
Her second book, Thin Skin, will be published in August 2023 by Pantheon Books. Her essays have appeared in New England Review, the New York Times, Outside, Guernica, and Tin House.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 557 reviews
September 2, 2019
I’ve read this so many times 🙃
February 25, 2020
I have to admit I am having difficulty processing this new writing style if blending genres. Here we have a memoir, a biography, some queer history and searching for answers. I enjoyed reading about the author living in Carson's house as she tries to assemble the information she has collected, and writing this book. She uses multiple sources, showing Carson's queer identity, including letters.
The book goes back and forth, the authors own struggle and acceptance of her own sexuality. She explains her interpretation of Carson's sexual identity, and how previous authorr about Carsons sexuality handled, rather badly, her relationships with other woman.
I found it difficult to go back and forth between both story elements, feeling that I was missing something. Carson, was a complicated character, her style of dress, her various illnesses, and I enjoyed those parts. On the whole though I think I prefer books that are clearly a memoir, or clearly a biography.
ARC from Edelweiss.
The book goes back and forth, the authors own struggle and acceptance of her own sexuality. She explains her interpretation of Carson's sexual identity, and how previous authorr about Carsons sexuality handled, rather badly, her relationships with other woman.
I found it difficult to go back and forth between both story elements, feeling that I was missing something. Carson, was a complicated character, her style of dress, her various illnesses, and I enjoyed those parts. On the whole though I think I prefer books that are clearly a memoir, or clearly a biography.
ARC from Edelweiss.
November 19, 2020
I feel like this is a standout read for this year and I hope I can explain why. Jenn Shapland explores her own life and identity through in-depth, multi-faceted, largely archival research of Carson McCullers, from her wardrobe to love letters to recordings of therapy sessions. Shapland lives at her house in Columbus, Georgia while working in the archives there, and traces her steps at Yaddo. She discovers scholars past and present all too willing to explain away McCullers' love of women, and in connecting the pieces pointing in that direction comes to terms with it in herself as well. I've never seen a self-examination through the artifacts of another person quite like this and it was a compelling read.
April 21, 2022
I wasn’t expecting to find this so heavy-going; I’m fascinated by the writer Carson McCullers as well as numerous members of her circle from friends like Gypsy Rose Lee and Elizabeth Bowen to potential lovers such as the beguiling Annemarie Schwarzenbach, but there was something about Jenn Shapland’s approach to her subject matter that I found less than engaging. It didn’t help that the loose structure felt more chaotic than organic, and Shapland’s musings on McCullers’s possible lesbian identity were vague and a little repetitive. Although I’ve always assumed McCullers was queer so Shapland’s ideas were neither revelatory nor revolutionary as far as I’m concerned.
Shapland became obsessed with McCullers after discovering love letters between her and Schwarzenbach buried in the archives where Shapland was working as an intern. She later unearthed a stash of material detailing McCullers’s intimate therapy sessions undertaken in the 1950s with Mary Mercer. Shapland wasn’t familiar with McCullers’s writing at the time but was so inspired by the image of the person she seemed to glimpse in the artefacts she uncovered, she felt empowered enough to finally come out as a lesbian herself. Her fixation on McCullers became a full-blown project, she lived for a while in McCullers’s former home in Georgia, surrounded by her clothes and other treasured possessions. She spent time at the famous Yaddo writing colony where McCullers wrote The Ballad of the Sad Café, reading her books and sifting through the biographical and autobiographical information on offer.
I did enjoy some of the details of McCullers’s everyday life, the things she wore, the objects she liked to have around her – although it's a pity there are no illustrations included here - but the actual biographical elements weren’t dissimilar to much of what I already knew from reading articles and other biographies. I imagine too, Shapland’s book could be quite challenging for readers less familiar with McCullers, it shifts about in a restless, roaming fashion, here and there in time and space, and it’s necessary to painstakingly piece together Shapland’s references and snippets of information like trying to work on a scattered, jigsaw puzzle. The idea behind this, of course, is to undermine conventional ideas of what biography or memoir might be, and to mingle subject with object. It’s a fairly commonplace approach, looking at books like My Judy Garland Life or the Road to Middlemarch, so in itself didn’t feel particularly fresh as a take on McCullers’s life and work.
Perhaps part of my lukewarm response to this stems from the rave reviews that led me to it, maybe I couldn’t help but be disappointed in what I actually found? And I did appreciate the focus on McCullers’s queer sensibilities, and the insistence on acknowledging her intense love of women – although Shapland does tend to veer off-track from time to time, especially in the Yaddo chapters. Reading this also made me itch to return to McCullers’s fiction, so I suppose in that sense it did have a positive impact. But overall a definite disappointment, frequently dry, often disjointed.
Rating: 2/2.5
Shapland became obsessed with McCullers after discovering love letters between her and Schwarzenbach buried in the archives where Shapland was working as an intern. She later unearthed a stash of material detailing McCullers’s intimate therapy sessions undertaken in the 1950s with Mary Mercer. Shapland wasn’t familiar with McCullers’s writing at the time but was so inspired by the image of the person she seemed to glimpse in the artefacts she uncovered, she felt empowered enough to finally come out as a lesbian herself. Her fixation on McCullers became a full-blown project, she lived for a while in McCullers’s former home in Georgia, surrounded by her clothes and other treasured possessions. She spent time at the famous Yaddo writing colony where McCullers wrote The Ballad of the Sad Café, reading her books and sifting through the biographical and autobiographical information on offer.
I did enjoy some of the details of McCullers’s everyday life, the things she wore, the objects she liked to have around her – although it's a pity there are no illustrations included here - but the actual biographical elements weren’t dissimilar to much of what I already knew from reading articles and other biographies. I imagine too, Shapland’s book could be quite challenging for readers less familiar with McCullers, it shifts about in a restless, roaming fashion, here and there in time and space, and it’s necessary to painstakingly piece together Shapland’s references and snippets of information like trying to work on a scattered, jigsaw puzzle. The idea behind this, of course, is to undermine conventional ideas of what biography or memoir might be, and to mingle subject with object. It’s a fairly commonplace approach, looking at books like My Judy Garland Life or the Road to Middlemarch, so in itself didn’t feel particularly fresh as a take on McCullers’s life and work.
Perhaps part of my lukewarm response to this stems from the rave reviews that led me to it, maybe I couldn’t help but be disappointed in what I actually found? And I did appreciate the focus on McCullers’s queer sensibilities, and the insistence on acknowledging her intense love of women – although Shapland does tend to veer off-track from time to time, especially in the Yaddo chapters. Reading this also made me itch to return to McCullers’s fiction, so I suppose in that sense it did have a positive impact. But overall a definite disappointment, frequently dry, often disjointed.
Rating: 2/2.5
February 2, 2021
Many of us find it appealing to visit the homes of writers, soaking up the atmosphere, getting a sense of the way they wrote, through their things. Shapland, an archivist, relates what she did and how she felt during her stay at McCullers’ house/museum in Columbus, Georgia, in preparation for writing this book. And even though I spent just one night in an apartment above the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, I understood (though while reading of McCullers’s home, I was reminded of Eudora Welty’s). After I thought of the Fitzgerald house, I came upon Shapland’s mention of visiting it once and her being disappointed because she thought it was Zelda’s childhood home and expected much more Zelda than she got. (My experience was different in that I felt Zelda was revealed to me there.) Shapland mentions that visit because growing up Zelda was the person she felt connected to until she “met” Carson (as she always refers to her).
Though I’ve read most of McCullers’s works, I didn’t know much of her personal life beyond what I gleaned from her fiction and the biographical emphasis on her two marriages to the same man. I’ve never been able to satisfactorily reconcile those two elements and after reading this, I now know why. McCullers didn’t closet herself, especially not in her later years, but apparently her official and unofficial biographers did.*
This isn’t a biography of McCullers. It’s Shapland’s memoir (see the title, though it should be subtitled A Memoir as other editions are) of how her affinity to McCullers grew, and how she herself became self-aware through the exploration of material in the archives where she worked. Her discovery of McCullers’ therapy transcripts, which McCullers hoped to shape into an autobiography before her untimely death, is instrumental to her insights. Some of McCullers’ clothes are in the archives and Shapland relates to those as well, understanding through them that feeling of “not masculine; not feminine, but a both that becomes other.”
The chapters are short and punchy, their titles meaningful. Judging by my highlights, my favorite chapter was ‘The High Line’ with its attempt to get a (historical) grip on the 2016 election. While reading this book, I was reminded of other memoir/genre-blending works I’ve read in recent years, especially Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House.
*(See message 9 below for a further explanation.)
Though I’ve read most of McCullers’s works, I didn’t know much of her personal life beyond what I gleaned from her fiction and the biographical emphasis on her two marriages to the same man. I’ve never been able to satisfactorily reconcile those two elements and after reading this, I now know why. McCullers didn’t closet herself, especially not in her later years, but apparently her official and unofficial biographers did.*
This isn’t a biography of McCullers. It’s Shapland’s memoir (see the title, though it should be subtitled A Memoir as other editions are) of how her affinity to McCullers grew, and how she herself became self-aware through the exploration of material in the archives where she worked. Her discovery of McCullers’ therapy transcripts, which McCullers hoped to shape into an autobiography before her untimely death, is instrumental to her insights. Some of McCullers’ clothes are in the archives and Shapland relates to those as well, understanding through them that feeling of “not masculine; not feminine, but a both that becomes other.”
The chapters are short and punchy, their titles meaningful. Judging by my highlights, my favorite chapter was ‘The High Line’ with its attempt to get a (historical) grip on the 2016 election. While reading this book, I was reminded of other memoir/genre-blending works I’ve read in recent years, especially Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House.
*(See message 9 below for a further explanation.)
May 17, 2020
I love queers writing about queers, but I don't think this story stands up to book form - it would have worked better as a think piece. There isn't too much new content here, other than outing McCullers on the record. And maybe I'm totally wrong, but I thought it was generally accepted that McCullers was into ladies?
This is my central issue: you don't get to evade the question, 'What claim do I have on a stranger's life?' by admitting that it's difficult to answer. Shapland continually inserts herself into McCullers' narrative, drawing parallels between their lives that don't add anything to the author's story, which is interesting/complex enough on its own.
For a carefully considered 'meditation on the art of biography', I'd recommend The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm. For a beautiful memoir / exploration of queer erasure, In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.
This is my central issue: you don't get to evade the question, 'What claim do I have on a stranger's life?' by admitting that it's difficult to answer. Shapland continually inserts herself into McCullers' narrative, drawing parallels between their lives that don't add anything to the author's story, which is interesting/complex enough on its own.
For a carefully considered 'meditation on the art of biography', I'd recommend The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm. For a beautiful memoir / exploration of queer erasure, In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.
August 26, 2025
Books seem to find me when I’m ready for them, or else I abandon them.
Gostei bastante da parte biográfica deste livro, porque fiquei com uma impressão muito boa da pessoa por detrás da escritora que eu já admirava, mas a parte autobiográfica da autora Jenn Shapland não resultou comigo.
To tell her own story, a writer must make herself a character. To tell another person’s story, a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.
Foi enquanto trabalhava num arquivo da Universidade do Texas, a fazer pesquisa para outros estudiosos, que Jenn Shapland encontrou a correspondência entre Annemarie Schwarzenbach, que ela não conhecia, e Carson McCullers, que nunca tinha lido. De imediato a autora, sendo lésbica, se identifica com as escritoras.
I had written letters like those to the women I’d loved. It was very little to go on, and I felt an utter certainty: Carson McCullers had loved women. Or at least this woman had loved her.
O interesse foi de tal forma fulminante, que Shapland cortou o cabelo curto e passou a usar roupas andróginas feitas por medida como Carson, catalogou os pertences pessoais da autora sulista para o Ransom Centre, viveu durante um mês na sua casa de infância, que agora é um museu, e passou uma temporada em Yaddo, onde também ela fez retiros de escrita nos anos 40 e 50. Quando começou a ir mais longe, dizendo que achava o seu rosto parecido com o de Carson e que também ela era doente crónica, comecei a achar as comparações forçadas, os paralelismos repetitivos e a extensão da obra umbiguista.
Em “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers” Jenn Shapland parte do pressuposto e segue o rumor de que Carson McCullers, apesar de se ter casado duas vezes com Reeves McCullers, era lésbica e que a sua paixão por mulheres sempre foi suavizada, abafada, distorcida e até categoricamente negada, como aconteceu a muitas mulheres da sua época e até posteriormente.
Ambivalence, as far as I can tell, is a highly coded way for Carson’s first major biographer to communicate “lesbian” or “queer” or “not straight” desire. Ambivalence, which could just as easily suggest confusion, indecision. A woman who doesn’t know her mind, her own wants.
Shapland sustenta extremamente bem as suas alegações tanto com as transcrições das sessões de terapia que Carson realizou com a intenção de escrever uma autobiografia, como com várias cartas que constam de arquivos, relatando também episódios com alguns escritores e escritoras contemporâneos que muito aprecio, como Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith e Katherine Anne Porter, mas extravasa as suas competências com afirmações totalmente infundadas e, diria mesmo, disparatadas.
Let’s call lesbian a lesbian. Call yourself a lesbian if you’ve ever loved women. Loved another woman. Period. You loved your mother? Lesbian.
Gostei bastante da parte biográfica deste livro, porque fiquei com uma impressão muito boa da pessoa por detrás da escritora que eu já admirava, mas a parte autobiográfica da autora Jenn Shapland não resultou comigo.
To tell her own story, a writer must make herself a character. To tell another person’s story, a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.
Foi enquanto trabalhava num arquivo da Universidade do Texas, a fazer pesquisa para outros estudiosos, que Jenn Shapland encontrou a correspondência entre Annemarie Schwarzenbach, que ela não conhecia, e Carson McCullers, que nunca tinha lido. De imediato a autora, sendo lésbica, se identifica com as escritoras.
I had written letters like those to the women I’d loved. It was very little to go on, and I felt an utter certainty: Carson McCullers had loved women. Or at least this woman had loved her.
O interesse foi de tal forma fulminante, que Shapland cortou o cabelo curto e passou a usar roupas andróginas feitas por medida como Carson, catalogou os pertences pessoais da autora sulista para o Ransom Centre, viveu durante um mês na sua casa de infância, que agora é um museu, e passou uma temporada em Yaddo, onde também ela fez retiros de escrita nos anos 40 e 50. Quando começou a ir mais longe, dizendo que achava o seu rosto parecido com o de Carson e que também ela era doente crónica, comecei a achar as comparações forçadas, os paralelismos repetitivos e a extensão da obra umbiguista.
Em “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers” Jenn Shapland parte do pressuposto e segue o rumor de que Carson McCullers, apesar de se ter casado duas vezes com Reeves McCullers, era lésbica e que a sua paixão por mulheres sempre foi suavizada, abafada, distorcida e até categoricamente negada, como aconteceu a muitas mulheres da sua época e até posteriormente.
Ambivalence, as far as I can tell, is a highly coded way for Carson’s first major biographer to communicate “lesbian” or “queer” or “not straight” desire. Ambivalence, which could just as easily suggest confusion, indecision. A woman who doesn’t know her mind, her own wants.
Shapland sustenta extremamente bem as suas alegações tanto com as transcrições das sessões de terapia que Carson realizou com a intenção de escrever uma autobiografia, como com várias cartas que constam de arquivos, relatando também episódios com alguns escritores e escritoras contemporâneos que muito aprecio, como Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith e Katherine Anne Porter, mas extravasa as suas competências com afirmações totalmente infundadas e, diria mesmo, disparatadas.
Let’s call lesbian a lesbian. Call yourself a lesbian if you’ve ever loved women. Loved another woman. Period. You loved your mother? Lesbian.
February 18, 2020
I had a lot of complicated feelings in reaction to this book, so like, bear with me. It’s deeply engaging, it’s history and biography in a deeply personal and irreverent tone, and it’s all packaged into these “microchapters” that seem to be all the rage right now. If you went by the title, you might think this book was about Carson McCullers, and reading this book you will learn a great deal about Carson McCullers, but I think really, this book is about Jenn Shapland learning to define herself through the process of studying Carson - which shouldn’t be surprising if you hang on to til you get to the last bit of the title: A Memoir.
(very early on in the book, Shapland goes from calling her McCullers or Carson McCullers to “Carson”, because while they begin as author and subject, the relationship is quickly transformed into mirror, imaginary friend, alter ego, take your pick).
In some ways, this book is about the impossibility of knowing the internal life of another person — especially a person who is dead, and thus cannot be asked what they meant by something — and, when trying to intuit this internal life, the impossibility of not shaping it through the lens of who you yourself are. This bias would be a weakness if one were writing a biography in the traditional sense, or if one were, I imagine, a historian, but it’s a strength here.
The thesis of Shapland’s work about McCullers - or one of them - is that McCullers was queer: she was a woman who loved other women. This reality is something previous keepers of McCuller’s legacy have either skimmed over or aggressively tried to erase. For Shapland, the process of asserting McCullers’ queerness becomes a way for her to assert her own identity. Shapland has also felt erased, has also known the terrible anxiety of being closeted and in writing “Carson” out into the open, she demands for herself the same visibility. The same self-assertion and self-knowledge. She’s here, she’s queer: it’s rad.
So this book is also a coming of age story. It’s a story about post-grad academia and internships, and figuring out what you want and what you want to write about. This part of Shapland’s journey is one that inspired in me equal parts tenderness and eye-rolling. (But shouldn’t any honest coming of age story inspire a certain amount of eye-rolling?). The book also stumbled a bit for me here, because in many ways, Shapland’s story felt like a throwback. When I started the book, I assumed she must be older than me (she’s not) because her story of conservative parents, college GF always called “the roommate”, a relationship doomed by being closeted, eventual embrace of lesbian identity, felt like a 90s era LBGT story. But okay, I can get behind that all that still happens, and all that is still relevant, but Shapland also writes with a kind of throwback embrace of the binary. She grapples explicitly with the idea of nonbinary gender identity only very briefly - and ends on a note that suggests that yes change and evolution are good, and we should embrace fluidity - but that she’s still not 100% comfortable with it. She also embraces a binary in the sense that her writing suggests a belief that one is either gay or straight, and that existing in the middle - or drifting from attraction to one sex to the other across a lifetime - is not something that exists. I got the feeling that Shapland was pushing back So Hard against the idea that Carson McCullers was straight that she refused to consider the possibility that maybe McCullers experienced love and/or attraction to both genders. Or maybe she just felt that part of McCullers’ life had already been pretty thoroughly documented.
(Although, I want to say, and maybe here is the place, that I went into this book with a back-of-my-head notion that Carson McCullers being queer was already accepted canon. Now, I don’t know if that’s because I read The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, and that book screams Queer Author at the the top of its lungs, or if I’d read about McCullers’ sexuality somewhere previously, but I was surprised how much emphasis Shapland put on the notion that she had to “disprove” McCullers’ straightness. And I think that her lack of inclusion of any previous scholarship that points out the queerness of McCullers’ life and work is a real weakness of this book).
Another weakness, and another aspect that makes this book feel dated, is that it’s a very narrow, very privileged view of queer identity. Shapland writes about McCullers’ insistence on supporting integration, and how she was praised for writing sympathetic characters of color - but never brings up the still-stark divide of access in the writing and publishing world along racial lines. She never addresses how McCullers’ class might or might not have played into her ability to be open about her sexuality. This is memoir in which the author spends a large chunk of it employed as an intern or at exclusive artist communities, but anxiety about how the bills were going to get paid never factors into in. This is a story by and about a person dealing with chronic illness - but there’s never any fear of not being able to access or afford medical care. And because of that, this book seems to present ‘coming out’ and defining a queer identity as enough of a story - and separate from issues of race and class, when it’s not anymore, and maybe it never was.
(very early on in the book, Shapland goes from calling her McCullers or Carson McCullers to “Carson”, because while they begin as author and subject, the relationship is quickly transformed into mirror, imaginary friend, alter ego, take your pick).
In some ways, this book is about the impossibility of knowing the internal life of another person — especially a person who is dead, and thus cannot be asked what they meant by something — and, when trying to intuit this internal life, the impossibility of not shaping it through the lens of who you yourself are. This bias would be a weakness if one were writing a biography in the traditional sense, or if one were, I imagine, a historian, but it’s a strength here.
The thesis of Shapland’s work about McCullers - or one of them - is that McCullers was queer: she was a woman who loved other women. This reality is something previous keepers of McCuller’s legacy have either skimmed over or aggressively tried to erase. For Shapland, the process of asserting McCullers’ queerness becomes a way for her to assert her own identity. Shapland has also felt erased, has also known the terrible anxiety of being closeted and in writing “Carson” out into the open, she demands for herself the same visibility. The same self-assertion and self-knowledge. She’s here, she’s queer: it’s rad.
So this book is also a coming of age story. It’s a story about post-grad academia and internships, and figuring out what you want and what you want to write about. This part of Shapland’s journey is one that inspired in me equal parts tenderness and eye-rolling. (But shouldn’t any honest coming of age story inspire a certain amount of eye-rolling?). The book also stumbled a bit for me here, because in many ways, Shapland’s story felt like a throwback. When I started the book, I assumed she must be older than me (she’s not) because her story of conservative parents, college GF always called “the roommate”, a relationship doomed by being closeted, eventual embrace of lesbian identity, felt like a 90s era LBGT story. But okay, I can get behind that all that still happens, and all that is still relevant, but Shapland also writes with a kind of throwback embrace of the binary. She grapples explicitly with the idea of nonbinary gender identity only very briefly - and ends on a note that suggests that yes change and evolution are good, and we should embrace fluidity - but that she’s still not 100% comfortable with it. She also embraces a binary in the sense that her writing suggests a belief that one is either gay or straight, and that existing in the middle - or drifting from attraction to one sex to the other across a lifetime - is not something that exists. I got the feeling that Shapland was pushing back So Hard against the idea that Carson McCullers was straight that she refused to consider the possibility that maybe McCullers experienced love and/or attraction to both genders. Or maybe she just felt that part of McCullers’ life had already been pretty thoroughly documented.
(Although, I want to say, and maybe here is the place, that I went into this book with a back-of-my-head notion that Carson McCullers being queer was already accepted canon. Now, I don’t know if that’s because I read The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, and that book screams Queer Author at the the top of its lungs, or if I’d read about McCullers’ sexuality somewhere previously, but I was surprised how much emphasis Shapland put on the notion that she had to “disprove” McCullers’ straightness. And I think that her lack of inclusion of any previous scholarship that points out the queerness of McCullers’ life and work is a real weakness of this book).
Another weakness, and another aspect that makes this book feel dated, is that it’s a very narrow, very privileged view of queer identity. Shapland writes about McCullers’ insistence on supporting integration, and how she was praised for writing sympathetic characters of color - but never brings up the still-stark divide of access in the writing and publishing world along racial lines. She never addresses how McCullers’ class might or might not have played into her ability to be open about her sexuality. This is memoir in which the author spends a large chunk of it employed as an intern or at exclusive artist communities, but anxiety about how the bills were going to get paid never factors into in. This is a story by and about a person dealing with chronic illness - but there’s never any fear of not being able to access or afford medical care. And because of that, this book seems to present ‘coming out’ and defining a queer identity as enough of a story - and separate from issues of race and class, when it’s not anymore, and maybe it never was.
October 23, 2020
This was a strange mix of biography and memoir. The author thinks about her own life as she works on a biography of Carson McCullers. Mainly written in vignettes, I found this engaging.
October 11, 2020
The new archival materials that Shapland brings into the biographical record on McCullers are wonderfully exciting, treasures: letters from Carson's crush the hot mess Annemarie Schwarzenbach, transcripts of McCullers' therapy sessions with Dr. Mary Mercer, who was--Shapland persuasively argues--likely a late-in-life lover. I loved reading about McCullers' life and loves and the problem of queer/lesbian erasure in the archive. I was frustrated/bewildered by Shapland's insistence on lesbian as a category for understanding McCullers' life and intimacies (why not queer? why not bisexual? why not fluid? or even romantic ace? etc) and the absence of any acknowledgment of an existing scholarly and writerly discourse on McCullers' queerness. Ultimately I found myself more disappointed than perhaps is warranted because there IS so much dishy queer lit gossip here and yet the austere, self-protective quality of the prose put me off--and I wanted to love this so much. I will probably use this in my Queer Studies class for the questions it poses around queer reading and queer historiography and look forward to revisiting with students' reactions in mind.
UPDATE: I did that (used this book in my Queer Studies class for the questions it poses around queer reading and queer historiography), and it worked!
UPDATE: I did that (used this book in my Queer Studies class for the questions it poses around queer reading and queer historiography), and it worked!
February 17, 2020
2.5, rounded up
Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a mix of genres: memoir, biography, queer history and a modicum of literary criticism. The book is also a detective story of sorts, an admittedly obsessive investigation into whether McCullers was a lesbian, something her biographers have failed to make clear. Mixing memoir and a biography of a fascinating life would be an unwieldy challenge but, working with resources unavailable to previous biographers, the author smartly focuses more on McCullers' possible female lovers than a fully detailed look at her life. While innovative, admirable and highly personal, the book, unfortunately, did not really work for me. Although I admired the author's commitment, I occasionally felt irked and was left wanting more.
I have been a Carson McCullers fan since I was teenager and recently reread her work. I had a cat I named Carson. Her writing left that indelible impression on me at an early age, drawn not only by her style and prose but her empathy for the misfits and the lonely. Although I knew the basics of Shapland’s book and felt excited by the premise, I was left disappointed. It may be difficult to please a lifelong fan.
As Shapland writes:
When people don’t recognize her name, I feel the need to mention that her books were well-known at the time, best sellers, that were made into movies and Broadway plays…But when the person does know Carson’s work, they reply with a look, a sort of swoon…I love her, they say...As I grew closer to Carson through research, it became more and more obvious that I was not alone in my sense of possession, of being possessed.
Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a mix of genres: memoir, biography, queer history and a modicum of literary criticism. The book is also a detective story of sorts, an admittedly obsessive investigation into whether McCullers was a lesbian, something her biographers have failed to make clear. Mixing memoir and a biography of a fascinating life would be an unwieldy challenge but, working with resources unavailable to previous biographers, the author smartly focuses more on McCullers' possible female lovers than a fully detailed look at her life. While innovative, admirable and highly personal, the book, unfortunately, did not really work for me. Although I admired the author's commitment, I occasionally felt irked and was left wanting more.
I have been a Carson McCullers fan since I was teenager and recently reread her work. I had a cat I named Carson. Her writing left that indelible impression on me at an early age, drawn not only by her style and prose but her empathy for the misfits and the lonely. Although I knew the basics of Shapland’s book and felt excited by the premise, I was left disappointed. It may be difficult to please a lifelong fan.
As Shapland writes:
When people don’t recognize her name, I feel the need to mention that her books were well-known at the time, best sellers, that were made into movies and Broadway plays…But when the person does know Carson’s work, they reply with a look, a sort of swoon…I love her, they say...As I grew closer to Carson through research, it became more and more obvious that I was not alone in my sense of possession, of being possessed.
March 8, 2020
I was hesitant about this book bc I don’t know *anything* about Carson McCullers and it completely blew me away. This book is an outstanding genre-blending hybrid memoir/biography. Shapland is in her twenties and coming out of a 6yr closeted relationship when she reads letters McCullers wrote to a woman. She instantly recognizes queer desire. This book resonated so much bc I so remember when you’re first coming out and desperate for any form of representation, feeling seen. Queer visibility is such a precarious thing, and lesbian love has not been represented as such throughout history. Shapland digs into Carson’s life, does a residency in her childhood home, and asks questions about visibility, history, love and more. The result is stunning.
Being unfamiliar with McCullers, my fave parts of this book were seeing what her work meant to the author. There were times when I wanted Shapland to go deeper, to ask questions I felt like she missed - why do we even need people to be out? What about bisexuality? But overall, I absolutely loved this book
Thanks to the publisher for sharing the book in exchange for my honest opinions. Def pick this one up!
Being unfamiliar with McCullers, my fave parts of this book were seeing what her work meant to the author. There were times when I wanted Shapland to go deeper, to ask questions I felt like she missed - why do we even need people to be out? What about bisexuality? But overall, I absolutely loved this book
Thanks to the publisher for sharing the book in exchange for my honest opinions. Def pick this one up!
August 7, 2020
Toen ik twintig was en in Brussel studeerde, werd ik een paar keer verliefd. Het bleken van die crushes te zijn die bleven duren. Zo ben ik na de ontdekking van ‘The Ballad of the Sad Café’ altijd gefascineerd gebleven door schrijfster Carson McCullers. Je hebt ook meteen mijn aandacht als je een naam noemt die verband houdt met de Bloomsbury Group.
In de afgelopen maanden heb ik twee boeken gelezen waarover ik hier nog niet heb geschreven: ‘My Autobiography of Carson McCullers’ van Jenn Shapland, en ‘Een ander leven’ van Rudi Meulemans. De boeken hebben schijnbaar niks gemeen. Toch is er een belangrijke overeenkomst: de auteurs koppelen hun persoonlijke leven aan hun passie voor een schrijfster.
Terwijl Jenn Shapland onderzoekt in hoeverre Carson McCullers hechte vriendschappen of onuitgesproken liefdesrelaties heeft gehad met vrouwen, gaat ze bij zichzelf na hoe ze haar homoseksualiteit een plek geeft. Een worsteling kun je het niet noemen, maar evident vindt ze het niet om zich — bijvoorbeeld — tijdens een schrijversresidentie te outen.
Rudi Meulemans heeft een traject uitgestippeld in de voetsporen van schrijfster Vita Sackville-West. Zij wordt vaak in één adem genoemd met Virginia Woolf, met wie ze een affaire had, maar net zo vaak wordt ze in verband gebracht met het prachtige Sissinghurst Castle en haar visie op tuinen. De reis die zij in 1947 heeft gemaakt doen Rudi en zijn vriend Luc nauwgezet over. In ‘Een ander leven’ bezoek je een aantal landhuizen in Zuidwest-Engeland, maar meer nog krijg je een wel heel persoonlijke inkijk in het leven van de schrijver zelf.
Als kennismaking met McCullers of Sackville-West zijn dit niet de twee titels waarmee je begint. Eerst maar eens verliefd worden op het werk van de twee dames. Als de verliefdheid blijft duren en je gaat hun werk verzamelen, dan zullen ‘My Autobiography of Carson McCullers’ en ‘Een ander leven’ vroeg of laat op je leesstapel terechtkomen.
In de afgelopen maanden heb ik twee boeken gelezen waarover ik hier nog niet heb geschreven: ‘My Autobiography of Carson McCullers’ van Jenn Shapland, en ‘Een ander leven’ van Rudi Meulemans. De boeken hebben schijnbaar niks gemeen. Toch is er een belangrijke overeenkomst: de auteurs koppelen hun persoonlijke leven aan hun passie voor een schrijfster.
Terwijl Jenn Shapland onderzoekt in hoeverre Carson McCullers hechte vriendschappen of onuitgesproken liefdesrelaties heeft gehad met vrouwen, gaat ze bij zichzelf na hoe ze haar homoseksualiteit een plek geeft. Een worsteling kun je het niet noemen, maar evident vindt ze het niet om zich — bijvoorbeeld — tijdens een schrijversresidentie te outen.
Rudi Meulemans heeft een traject uitgestippeld in de voetsporen van schrijfster Vita Sackville-West. Zij wordt vaak in één adem genoemd met Virginia Woolf, met wie ze een affaire had, maar net zo vaak wordt ze in verband gebracht met het prachtige Sissinghurst Castle en haar visie op tuinen. De reis die zij in 1947 heeft gemaakt doen Rudi en zijn vriend Luc nauwgezet over. In ‘Een ander leven’ bezoek je een aantal landhuizen in Zuidwest-Engeland, maar meer nog krijg je een wel heel persoonlijke inkijk in het leven van de schrijver zelf.
Als kennismaking met McCullers of Sackville-West zijn dit niet de twee titels waarmee je begint. Eerst maar eens verliefd worden op het werk van de twee dames. Als de verliefdheid blijft duren en je gaat hun werk verzamelen, dan zullen ‘My Autobiography of Carson McCullers’ en ‘Een ander leven’ vroeg of laat op je leesstapel terechtkomen.
February 5, 2020
What is a queer story and how do we tell it? What form should it take and who gets to tell our stories? Jenn Shapland's "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers," a book that is not quite memoir, not quite biography, asks these questions and in return reveals a soulful answer for queer readers.
Shapland, a cynical academic ready to leave the ivory tower in search of something else, stumbles upon letters between Carson McCullers and her therapist-turned-friend (and maybe lover), Mary. These letters ignite a journey that drives Shapland to ask serious questions about her own queerness and experience as a lesbian all while searching out what it means to make space for a historical and cultural icon to speak about her own queerness at a time when words to describe such an experience were limited. And in doing so, Shapland brings together autobiography and biography in such a uniquely beautiful way, and she gets to the heart of what it means to be queer and to reflect on oneself as queer.
There really isn't a book like "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers" out there - at least none that I have read. This book is special and magical and unique. And most importantly queerly self-reflective. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. Read it and think about it with me.
Shapland, a cynical academic ready to leave the ivory tower in search of something else, stumbles upon letters between Carson McCullers and her therapist-turned-friend (and maybe lover), Mary. These letters ignite a journey that drives Shapland to ask serious questions about her own queerness and experience as a lesbian all while searching out what it means to make space for a historical and cultural icon to speak about her own queerness at a time when words to describe such an experience were limited. And in doing so, Shapland brings together autobiography and biography in such a uniquely beautiful way, and she gets to the heart of what it means to be queer and to reflect on oneself as queer.
There really isn't a book like "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers" out there - at least none that I have read. This book is special and magical and unique. And most importantly queerly self-reflective. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. Read it and think about it with me.
February 15, 2021
This is a book about the writer’s experience writing about Carson McCullers. I don’t care about the author. I’m not curious about how writing this made her feel. I DO care about Carson McCullers’ experiences and thoughts which isn’t what this book is about. I found this book annoying and maybe it’s just me but I thought I was getting a book about a famous talented writer but it’s about someone using that writer’s name so she can get people to read about her boring year avoiding working on her doctorate.
February 1, 2022
Door het uitgangspunt – het verweven van queer geschiedenissen door memoire te combineren met biografie – was mijn interesse meteen gewekt, maar het is niet geweldig uitgewerkt. Dat ligt voor een deel niet aan de auteur: het boek steunt sterk op transcripties van opgenomen therapiesessies van McCullers (die bedoeld waren als startpunt van haar autobiografie), waaruit kennelijk maar heel mondjesmaat geciteerd mocht worden, waardoor je het als lezer moet doen met de parafrases van Shapland, en die zijn niet altijd bevredigend. Daarnaast kwam van het memoiredeel ook weinig terecht; ze komt vaak niet verder dan parallellen tussen haar leven en dat van McCullers aanstippen (allebei lesbisch en chronisch ziek), die ze dan met een quasi-diepzinnige twijfelende eindzin afsluit die ik liever als beginpunt van iets had gezien. Vreemd genoeg heb ik dit verder wel met veel interesse gelezen en is dit zelfs het eerste boek sinds mijn afstuderen dat weer een sprankje vrijwillig leesplezier in me naar boven heeft gehaald, dus ook fijn dat mijn master me niet volledig gebroken heeft.
February 6, 2020
If you're an avid reader, read this book just to read something written in an entirely different format. Part biography, part memoir - it's woven together in such a fascinating way. I really liked it. Plus, now I'm fascinated with library archives. Who knew?!
June 16, 2023
A genre-blurring work of academic scholarship & autobiography which takes up as a major focus the long history of trying to downplay and/or obscure McCuller's lesbianism, & what that has meant for queer readers. Insightful byways explored involve such topics as McCuller's idiosyncratic sartorial style, her lifelong physical disabilities, the discovery of previously unpublished love letters, the often deeply conservative nature of institutional archives, artist estates, & academic communities. And while I get why Shapland's insertion of her own life & experiences rankles some, for me it's an eloquent & often moving evocation of how obsessive—& personally invested—some of us get around our research into the historical past, & how it can inadvertently become a proxy for our own processes of self-realization & discovery.
A text that has deeply informed my own thinking on queer historiography & how to relate to the queer past. Bumped up to five stars from a (very strong) four upon a second reading.
"Maybe it’s just that the stories of her relationship with women are partial, hard to compile. To piece them together, you have to read like a queer person, like someone who knows what it is like to be closeted, and who knows how to look for reflections of your own experience in even the most unlikely places"
A text that has deeply informed my own thinking on queer historiography & how to relate to the queer past. Bumped up to five stars from a (very strong) four upon a second reading.
"Maybe it’s just that the stories of her relationship with women are partial, hard to compile. To piece them together, you have to read like a queer person, like someone who knows what it is like to be closeted, and who knows how to look for reflections of your own experience in even the most unlikely places"
August 29, 2020
I tried getting through this book, I really did. I love Carson McCullers - she's a Southern writer who made my youthful Southern self want to be a writer. But I found Shapland's writing sloppy and indulgent. What troubled me most was the presumptuousness; when we view another, who lived in a different time and place, through the lens of our own experience, we risk skewing their history and story. Maybe one day I'll return to this book and find more meaning and value but for now I will pick up a McCullers' book and read her own words.
June 17, 2020
Such a smart, honest and yes, loving book. This is how biographies should all be written: as a conversation. I learned so much and love Carson McCullers even more of finishing.
February 1, 2021
loved this - all about the amazing Carson Mcullers and also about Jenn, and being queer, and how people have been queer historically, and chronic illness and books and writing.
March 8, 2023
Czuję z tą książką namacalną bliskość. To nie jest autobiografia, to coś w stylu próby archiwizowania, wymyślania, meandrowania, zastanawiania się, dorabiania niteczek, szukania możności przylgnięcia, chęci przylgnięcia.
March 15, 2020
I was drawn to reading this book for the same reason that the author was drawn to writing it – a fascination with Carson McCullers. Yes, there is the writing… so honest and heartbreaking and preternaturally wise. And the lore…how did she write like that so young? And the style…the blunt hair and pixie face and wide cuffed trousers. I have been enchanted by all of it as Shapland clearly has in that in writing McCullers’ story she has written herself in tandem:
But in my own life, identity was slow to develop, and I didn’t fully come into myself until my late twenties. Perhaps that is what I saw, from the start, in Carson: a familiarly protracted becoming.
It is an interesting style of narrative – the intertwining of biography and memoir – and, while I have seen shades of it, this is the first I have read them so deeply enmeshed with one another. Shapland was fortunate to be granted incredible access to McCullers’ papers (including descriptions of McCullers’ therapy sessions) through her work with the famous author’s archives and this allows her to anchor the book in a very personal way.
There are spaces in the book that works so well, in particular the way Shapland examines her own coming-out story while searching for the signs in McCullers’ texts and papers for signs of her own romantic love for women. There is a beautiful earnestness of the young author in search of validation, understanding, and camaraderie through the life of the iconic author. And, through that course, Shapland touches on the question of why famous women of arts and letters at the time of McCullers felt so keenly the pressure and need to stay in the closet (this was a question also examined well by Imani Perry in her biography of Lorraine Hansberry). This is an interesting question and I do feel it could have been examined a little deeper.
Other parts of the book felt a little too labored for my taste, namely when Shapland tends toward a kind of introspection of the introvert in an examination of her own life. It’s clear the author is coming into her own during the course of writing, but the near-constant perspective of outsider gets a little grating at times – eg, if you are a part of an exclusive writing colony who then is asked to moderate a panel by a famous poet, there is no need to keep hammering that you think it is all a mistake that you don’t deserve…you’re there, own it. Memoir can be quite difficult in the sense that the author is illustrating a personal and individual experience but, nevertheless, must bring the reader along. Shapland doesn’t always achieve that and loses the flow of the book by miring in diary-esque state of wandering.
But in my own life, identity was slow to develop, and I didn’t fully come into myself until my late twenties. Perhaps that is what I saw, from the start, in Carson: a familiarly protracted becoming.
It is an interesting style of narrative – the intertwining of biography and memoir – and, while I have seen shades of it, this is the first I have read them so deeply enmeshed with one another. Shapland was fortunate to be granted incredible access to McCullers’ papers (including descriptions of McCullers’ therapy sessions) through her work with the famous author’s archives and this allows her to anchor the book in a very personal way.
There are spaces in the book that works so well, in particular the way Shapland examines her own coming-out story while searching for the signs in McCullers’ texts and papers for signs of her own romantic love for women. There is a beautiful earnestness of the young author in search of validation, understanding, and camaraderie through the life of the iconic author. And, through that course, Shapland touches on the question of why famous women of arts and letters at the time of McCullers felt so keenly the pressure and need to stay in the closet (this was a question also examined well by Imani Perry in her biography of Lorraine Hansberry). This is an interesting question and I do feel it could have been examined a little deeper.
Other parts of the book felt a little too labored for my taste, namely when Shapland tends toward a kind of introspection of the introvert in an examination of her own life. It’s clear the author is coming into her own during the course of writing, but the near-constant perspective of outsider gets a little grating at times – eg, if you are a part of an exclusive writing colony who then is asked to moderate a panel by a famous poet, there is no need to keep hammering that you think it is all a mistake that you don’t deserve…you’re there, own it. Memoir can be quite difficult in the sense that the author is illustrating a personal and individual experience but, nevertheless, must bring the reader along. Shapland doesn’t always achieve that and loses the flow of the book by miring in diary-esque state of wandering.
July 8, 2021
I feel conflicted about this book. On the one hand, it's a moving memoir of a woman figuring out her identity. It also brings a lot of facts about McCullers's life to my attention, specifically her tortured love life with both men and women. On the other hand, this is one of those books which takes a complex subject and views it through a narrow lens: the author seems desperate to read queerness into every facet of McCullers's life, her works, and of the people around her, and of every author she feels some connection to. This is something Shapland freely admits, she says multiple times in the book that she knows she's trying to make McCullers fit into the image she wants her to fit into. This is no impersonal biography of an author. This is a deeply personal book about the author more so than about Carson McCullers.
The books Carson McCullers wrote are rich with themes. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is primarily a story about disparate social misfits dealing with spiritual isolation, but it also tackles race issues, the evils of capitalism, breakdowns in the justice system, and the pains of growing up. To Jenn Shapland, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a queer story. She thinks John Singer and Spiros Antonapolous are a gay couple, which is the most wishful reading of a text I've ever heard. Antonapolous is a spiritual figure, almost a deity to Singer, not a romantic figure; if there relationship is a romance, it totally undermines the novel's main themes about how people foolishly construct religious figures for themselves to worship.
Shapland spends much of the book talking about how McCullers's previous biographers "straight-washed" her life, desperate to erase any hints of her queerness. This is a good thing to do. However, Shapland goes far out of her way to make McCullers fit into the image she wants her to fit. Shapland states that there is a double standard, that a subject is assumed straight but that there must be an overwhelming amount of evidence to prove someone is other than straight. But McCullers was married to a man (the same man, twice!), so can you really blame people for assuming she was straight? And I think Shapland overstates the extent to which people have tried to hide the author's queerness. I haven't read the other biographies of McCullers, but a quick google will show you that McCullers's sexuality is very much not a secret.
This is a moving memoir, but it is a very simplistic take on a complicated person. I'm very interested in McCullers's life, so I'm going to seek out a more complete/nuanced biography.
(Disclaimer: I don't think Shapland would disagree that her book isn't a complete picture of McCullers. She wasn't trying to recount the full life of the author. Perhaps we just wanted different things and I'm asking too much of a short book that's doing biography, memoir, and social commentary all at once.)
The books Carson McCullers wrote are rich with themes. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is primarily a story about disparate social misfits dealing with spiritual isolation, but it also tackles race issues, the evils of capitalism, breakdowns in the justice system, and the pains of growing up. To Jenn Shapland, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a queer story. She thinks John Singer and Spiros Antonapolous are a gay couple, which is the most wishful reading of a text I've ever heard. Antonapolous is a spiritual figure, almost a deity to Singer, not a romantic figure; if there relationship is a romance, it totally undermines the novel's main themes about how people foolishly construct religious figures for themselves to worship.
Shapland spends much of the book talking about how McCullers's previous biographers "straight-washed" her life, desperate to erase any hints of her queerness. This is a good thing to do. However, Shapland goes far out of her way to make McCullers fit into the image she wants her to fit. Shapland states that there is a double standard, that a subject is assumed straight but that there must be an overwhelming amount of evidence to prove someone is other than straight. But McCullers was married to a man (the same man, twice!), so can you really blame people for assuming she was straight? And I think Shapland overstates the extent to which people have tried to hide the author's queerness. I haven't read the other biographies of McCullers, but a quick google will show you that McCullers's sexuality is very much not a secret.
This is a moving memoir, but it is a very simplistic take on a complicated person. I'm very interested in McCullers's life, so I'm going to seek out a more complete/nuanced biography.
(Disclaimer: I don't think Shapland would disagree that her book isn't a complete picture of McCullers. She wasn't trying to recount the full life of the author. Perhaps we just wanted different things and I'm asking too much of a short book that's doing biography, memoir, and social commentary all at once.)
January 23, 2022
Jenn Shapland argues that every biography is a reflection of its author. She takes the concept to another level with this very self-aware biography of Carson McCullers.
I thought I’d be the target audience of creative nonfiction about a disabled author from the mid-1900’s secretly being a lesbian, and a contemporary writer who shares those identities. What I expected was a book about finding your own identity by parsing the uncertainties of someone else’s. What I got was an exhausting insistence that wouldn’t let go.
Shapland conveyed an overwhelming urgency which dragged me down with her. The non-chronological order of the chapters spun us in circles around a handful of primary sources, most of which weren’t quoted due to copyright concerns. (At one point, she’s describing a transcript and says, “if only I could share them with you.”)
By the halfway mark, she had proven many times over that McCullers loved women throughout her life. Yet she wouldn’t stop searching for the perfect piece of evidence that would reveal each and every facet of McCullers’ sexuality, which she admits was done “in an effort to feel [her] own experience validated.” The idea of refusing to let go until you find the ~truth~ about someone felt incredibly invasive and painful to me. It was insistent to the point of flattening McCullers, molding her into Shapland’s perception of who she’d like McCullers to be. But she was hypersensitive about the role she played in this narrative, which seemed to relieve her of any perceived need to course correct. It felt like an odd way to dissuade criticism.
Shapland refused to truly consider the possibility of McCullers having a different identity, like being bi. Instead, she claims she “prefer[s] the idea that we are all part lesbian.” And rather than any serious, nuanced discussion about gender identity, she describes learning about another author using they/them pronouns, and how that bothered her: “My lesbian hero disidentifying from womanhood? How could I process this?”
She saw freedom in the identification of McCullers as a lesbian, but in the process of validating her own experience, this book missed the expansiveness of queer possibility.
two positives:
-I appreciated the discussion of invisible illnesses and queerness, and the overlapping “fear of not being real” that comes with both of those experiences
-This book successfully encouraged me to pick up McCullers’ own work!
I thought I’d be the target audience of creative nonfiction about a disabled author from the mid-1900’s secretly being a lesbian, and a contemporary writer who shares those identities. What I expected was a book about finding your own identity by parsing the uncertainties of someone else’s. What I got was an exhausting insistence that wouldn’t let go.
Shapland conveyed an overwhelming urgency which dragged me down with her. The non-chronological order of the chapters spun us in circles around a handful of primary sources, most of which weren’t quoted due to copyright concerns. (At one point, she’s describing a transcript and says, “if only I could share them with you.”)
By the halfway mark, she had proven many times over that McCullers loved women throughout her life. Yet she wouldn’t stop searching for the perfect piece of evidence that would reveal each and every facet of McCullers’ sexuality, which she admits was done “in an effort to feel [her] own experience validated.” The idea of refusing to let go until you find the ~truth~ about someone felt incredibly invasive and painful to me. It was insistent to the point of flattening McCullers, molding her into Shapland’s perception of who she’d like McCullers to be. But she was hypersensitive about the role she played in this narrative, which seemed to relieve her of any perceived need to course correct. It felt like an odd way to dissuade criticism.
Shapland refused to truly consider the possibility of McCullers having a different identity, like being bi. Instead, she claims she “prefer[s] the idea that we are all part lesbian.” And rather than any serious, nuanced discussion about gender identity, she describes learning about another author using they/them pronouns, and how that bothered her: “My lesbian hero disidentifying from womanhood? How could I process this?”
She saw freedom in the identification of McCullers as a lesbian, but in the process of validating her own experience, this book missed the expansiveness of queer possibility.
two positives:
-I appreciated the discussion of invisible illnesses and queerness, and the overlapping “fear of not being real” that comes with both of those experiences
-This book successfully encouraged me to pick up McCullers’ own work!
December 27, 2020
“maybe it’s just that her relationships with women are partial, hard to compile. to piece them together, you have to read like a queer person, like someone who knows how to look for reflections of your own experience in even the most unlikely places.”
as someone with an already-existing goodreads tag “lesbian archives,” i don’t even know where to begin with how perfect this book is. as biography, as memoir, as queer literary history, it’s what i’ve always dreamed of; at one point shapland notes a version of this book could be written about any of the lesbians mentioned in relation to mccullers, and there’s nothing i’d want more. i had to almost fight the urge to make a list on my phone as i read of all the lesbians in this constellation of creatives (honestly, i wish there had been a list of characters included in the work), to open a dozen wikipedia pages, to immerse myself in the queerness of history that is always so much larger than conventional narrative methods would expose. it was also impossible to resist superimposing my own desires for a shirley jackson biography like this, a corrective to the idea that some form of “proof” is needed before sexuality can be examined more thoroughly, which is itself interrogated as a goal of biography at length by shapland:
“what is the precise evidence for love? documentation of sexual encounters? examples of daily intimacies? easier to tell and to 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.”
just, basically, wow. wow! wow.
July 15, 2025
it was great! wrote my review in my journal haha
April 25, 2025
(pel club de lectura de ca la dona)
3,5!
reflexions molt interessants sobre com investigar i reconstruir el record de personatges públics, ajuntant les peces que semblen formar la imatge més propera possible a la realitat, malgrat totes les limitacions que això comporta. m’ha agradat descobrir la carson a través d’aquesta autora, que me l’ha apropat més i ara tinc ganes de llegir-la.
tot i així, m’ha fallat l’estructura dels capítols tan breus i desordenats, que acabaven repetint la mateixa idea de forma dispersa al llarg del llibre. pel que diu l’autora, és una decisió conscient, ja que no te la intenció de ser una biografia convencional, sinó un recull d’idees derivats de la investigació dels arxius. ho entenc, però no m’acaba de convèncer, crec que es pot aconseguir escapar d’una estructura lineal sense perdre un fil conductor coherent.
3,5!
reflexions molt interessants sobre com investigar i reconstruir el record de personatges públics, ajuntant les peces que semblen formar la imatge més propera possible a la realitat, malgrat totes les limitacions que això comporta. m’ha agradat descobrir la carson a través d’aquesta autora, que me l’ha apropat més i ara tinc ganes de llegir-la.
tot i així, m’ha fallat l’estructura dels capítols tan breus i desordenats, que acabaven repetint la mateixa idea de forma dispersa al llarg del llibre. pel que diu l’autora, és una decisió conscient, ja que no te la intenció de ser una biografia convencional, sinó un recull d’idees derivats de la investigació dels arxius. ho entenc, però no m’acaba de convèncer, crec que es pot aconseguir escapar d’una estructura lineal sense perdre un fil conductor coherent.
January 4, 2021
CALL! IT! LOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
this is a perfect book.
this is a perfect book.
May 21, 2025
3.5 stars
Do you like:
- nonfiction that's a blend of biography and memoir?
- writing that mixes personal reflection with historical research?
- books that explore queer histories? specifically queer women's?
- books that explore archives and archival records?
- Carson McCullers?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland is the perfect book for you. I read this one on audio a few years ago--narrated by the author herself--and really loved it. It's exactly all the things I just listed: a blend of the personal and the historical, a carefully-researched look into Carson McCullers and her life, but also, and in tandem, a reflection on the author's own life and queerness. The title says it all: it's not a biography of Carson McCullers, but an autobiography. What does it mean to write a book about yourself through the lens of someone else? And conversely, what does it mean to write about someone else through the lens of your own self? These are the questions the book asks, and ultimately it is an exploration of the ways in which we are always tangled up in each other's stories, past and present.
I've since gone on to read another book of Shapland's--an essay collection called Thin Skin--and what I love most about her writing is how thoughtful she is. Her writing feels careful and measured not in a way that's contrived or hesitant, but rather that's a mark of someone who's thought deeply about what they want to say and how they want to say it. This book took her a long time to write, and it shows--and I say that as a complete compliment. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a culmination of years of growth, research, and reflection, and all those things together make for a book that's insightful, compelling, and nuanced. I really loved this one, and would absolutely recommend it, especially on audio.
Do you like:
- nonfiction that's a blend of biography and memoir?
- writing that mixes personal reflection with historical research?
- books that explore queer histories? specifically queer women's?
- books that explore archives and archival records?
- Carson McCullers?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland is the perfect book for you. I read this one on audio a few years ago--narrated by the author herself--and really loved it. It's exactly all the things I just listed: a blend of the personal and the historical, a carefully-researched look into Carson McCullers and her life, but also, and in tandem, a reflection on the author's own life and queerness. The title says it all: it's not a biography of Carson McCullers, but an autobiography. What does it mean to write a book about yourself through the lens of someone else? And conversely, what does it mean to write about someone else through the lens of your own self? These are the questions the book asks, and ultimately it is an exploration of the ways in which we are always tangled up in each other's stories, past and present.
I've since gone on to read another book of Shapland's--an essay collection called Thin Skin--and what I love most about her writing is how thoughtful she is. Her writing feels careful and measured not in a way that's contrived or hesitant, but rather that's a mark of someone who's thought deeply about what they want to say and how they want to say it. This book took her a long time to write, and it shows--and I say that as a complete compliment. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a culmination of years of growth, research, and reflection, and all those things together make for a book that's insightful, compelling, and nuanced. I really loved this one, and would absolutely recommend it, especially on audio.
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