For me, as a reader, the book is marred by Shapland’s obsessive need to emphasise McCullers’ sexual orientation, but this single mindedness does provide a genuinely different narrative drive to the book and works well with Shapland’s structure for the book.I read McCullers’ novels and short stories in a short period in 2000 to 2001, The Mortgaged Heart in 2009 and recently read Illuminations and Night Glare, McCullers’ unfinished “autobiography” (dictated, not written). This is a memoir of Jenn Shapland’s obsession with Carson McCullers and placing her as a lesbian, to authenticate Shapland’s own lesbianism. 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. The results articulate something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories.
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. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters' language―but does not see Carson as history has portrayed her.Īnd 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. 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. "Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a monumental achievement." -Carmen Maria Machado
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